


a different kind of blessing

by Crimson1, sugarybowl



Series: Let me tell you a story about war: [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Earth-17 adjecent, Earth-33 Bartholomew "Tolly", I have signed a contract for a happy ending but I'm going to make you hurt on the way there, LenxTolly, M/M, yes but not really ColdFlash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-03-30 01:13:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13939389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crimson1/pseuds/Crimson1, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: Len has long since returned from the dark, broken Earth where he met a broken Barry named Bart and led a broken life with him. Bart’s gone now, but a new Barry needs Len’s help, this one called Tolly, different from either version Len has met so far, and against his better judgment, he says yes to embark on a new world all over again.Once more, Len finds himself caught up in strings he needs to untangle, in the middle of something unexpected as he waits—perhaps too long—for how this new chapter in his life will end.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We couldn't hold it anymore and a lot of you were curious about Tolly so... here y'all go!

Len squints at the brightness of the world. It surprises him, ready as he had been to be faced with a world consumed by storms and plagues. Parts of him, quiet ones that kept him up at night, told him he missed the dark and the broken, missed the adrenaline of death-laced kisses of his-but-not-his once lover. In pieces, the boy had described it, genuine tears in his eyes. He’d shown up at Barry Allen’s doorstep with his face, an unkempt beard, and a sad story to tell – and Len had followed him head-first away from home. 

The world they’ve crossed into is certainly in ruins – but not the ravaged Earth destroyed by a cracking atmosphere the boy had described to them. This place looks no more or less broken than Anytown USA, abandoned and disused by the coast-hungry masses. There is a church coated white from stairs to steeple on a worn dirt road littered with instantly-ancient cans of beer. In the distance, Len can spot a dusty billboard promising hellfire to the unrepentant. Dotted throughout the landscape, he can make out the faded pastels of small houses and the tree-lined markings of larger estates. The only thing that seems out of place in such a sickeningly average town is the prison-like complex wrapped around the back of the church. Its heavily blocked structure and fresh coat of sleet gray highlighting its ominous prominence in the town square. Still there is more at stake here than an oddly-placed super-max. 

“You’ve got about twenty-seven seconds to explain why it isn’t raining acid frogs on us, kid,” Len all but growls at the man standing behind him. Len had seen the cracks in his mask, of course he had, out of the corner of his eye. The part that disgusts him most is how eagerly he looked away. Everyone has a fatal weakness - cold, heat, rocks from one’s home planet – Len’s just so happened to be every incarnation of Barry Allen. 

The story that Bartholomew “Tolly” Wells had served up was a complicated one – but not any wilder than the tangle of timelines and rips in time-space that the Flash crew and Legends were both used to. Len is certain, so certain, that he could have seen through the same lies playing on any other face.

He turns to him and finds his breath is held uncomfortably in the middle of his chest. 

Barry’s eyes – Bart’s, Tolly’s – he expects them to glint with triumphant wickedness or shine in heartfelt regret. Len can only see the same tiredness he’d clocked on the boy when he first laid eyes on him, and something hard there too, something broken.

“I hedged my bets,” Tolly says, utterly unapologetic, “and figured the truth wouldn’t convince you to come.”

“Didn’t cross your mind I’d ice you for not letting me make that call?” Len asks, drawing and aiming his gun. 

“I thought of everything,” the boy says fervently. “You won’t kill me. You haven’t yet.”

Len runs through the possibilities. At the top of the list is a swap, plain and simple. Someone on this Earth is in the market for a face like Len’s and maybe ain’t so picky about who it belongs to. The boy is desperate and willing to hunt down a double to trade. Another is that the boy wants him for himself, that Bart’s love was too strong and too deep not to cut through the universes, a curse upon Len to replace a better loved self from world to world. Neither would do and yet, here he stands face to face with the one who made him weak and he can’t. He won’t. He knows indelibly that he never will be able to kill him.

“And what exactly is worth the risk of assuming what I will and won’t do?” he finally asks, just to see what he’s up against. 

The man looks at him and answers, tired and hopeful and full of rage, “My world.”

Len knows without asking for an explanation that Tolly doesn’t mean the world around them, because livable or not, it’s still a mess, not something worth loving or worth the kind of mad grief he sees in Tolly’s eyes. So what, he wonders, is Tolly’s world, and what has Len gotten himself into?

XXXXX

Barry, Cisco, and Wally were all there to introduce Len to Tolly months after an expired Bart was carried off in Mick’s—Pyre’s—arms to return to a world with the wrong kind of light. Len took a day to decide if he could truly follow the boy asking for his help, Tolly staying at some rundown motel instead of in STAR Labs that he was as pleased with as if it was the Four Seasons. He’d been there a few days prior, scouting, having snuck in through the portal undetected, so he had a place to squat while Len made up his mind. 

The same cast and crew surround them the next day, the others, so many of them now that make up Team Flash, the Legends, and more, off doing broader things than helping a wayward breacher. Len prefers that, only having to cater to a few faces. Mick is on mission, Lisa he saw last night, and even she encouraged him to take a chance, to move on.

"Even if it is with that same sweet face, Lenny. Maybe this is something you need to do."

Len knows better than to hold something like hope in his heart. But he's weak, always has been, he’s worse now maybe than ever before, because helping is easier than admitting he's hopeful for more than a quick trek into a new world. 

Once, being dropped into a new earth came with pain and suffering and glaring uncertainty, and now, for whatever foolish reason, Len agrees to do it again. 

“Let’s see what we can find, kid, and if there’s something worth saving on your world, we’ll come back and bring in the cavalry to help. Sound like a plan?”

Tolly had smiled at him like he’d discovered everything he’d ever been missing. “Yeah. That sounds amazing. Thank you.”

If only Len had pushed harder, been more skeptical, and noticed he’d been conned. 

XXXXX 

“There was no Age of Heroes, was there?” Len says.

“Oh, there was. The ones still recognized today were human though. The others, hell, even the humans who sided with them, might as well be war criminals now. That’s what Commander Cold would be if he’d lived. I didn’t lie about that, the man he was, but there isn’t a statue of him. There isn’t a statue of anyone who really stood for anything. We carry his words like marks on our hearts, we pass them around and down like old jewels. But he’s not here now, none of them are. You’re not him, but you can be useful.” 

Useful, that’s all Len was to Tolly. 

He tries to take stock of the lies, of just how many there were. Tolly doesn’t know any of Team Flash in this world, not the ones from Earth-1 he met. Not Cisco or Wally. Who of any of Barry Allen’s friends and family exist for Tolly Wells, Len wonders? 

“Was the light real?” he asks. 

“What?” Tolly says as if annoyed, hurrying on ahead down the empty road and forcing Len to follow. 

“The light that led you to my world,” Len says, hardly believing his own words and a reality in which they made sense. 

“That was real. Like a beacon. But I don’t care about fate, fate’s never done anything for me. I only care about the people we need to get out of here.”

“You could have just said that,” Len calls out even as the man tries to keep walking away from him. 

“I didn’t know you,” he answers without breaking a stride, “I still don’t.” 

“You thought you knew me enough to—”

“Shh.” Tolly hushes Len sharply and pushes him back behind some broken down car before they can reach the fortified church. 

“I know you’re all twisted up about me lying and all but you really need to keep quiet,” he whispers, “I haven’t come all this way to end up in the Fountain again.”

Len looks around and takes in the truth of this place. He sees the CCTV cameras pointed at all the wrong places and the fences and the signs posted on them. He sees the way the quaint looking church actually connects directly into the hostile looking fortress around it, and he sees the fear old and familiar in the boy’s eyes. 

He nods, letting Tolly know that he’s willing to table the discussion and go about the business of getting them out of this high security area undetected. It would help, of course, if Len had any idea where they were going. 

Were they simply trying to get across the town without getting busted or were they trying to get into the secure area to get something or someone out? Len can only follow his instincts and Tolly’s lead as they avoid cameras and hidden guard posts until they are across the town square and into a wooded area. 

“That was impressive,” Tolly breathes out, back against a tree once they’re in the clear. 

“I’m the best at what I do,” Len says, and then quickly comes to realize something. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

“Save the world, I suppose,” Tolly answers with a one-shouldered shrug, “not to make light of that just saying- I’m not really sure what that’s about is all.”

Len snorts, low enough that his companion might not have noticed it at all. “You really didn’t do your research, did you, kid?”

“No time,” he sighs, so deep and honest that Len can’t help but believe it – despite the lies. “Now let’s go.”

Len considers pressing his key back home and skipping out on the rest of this adventure. Unlike his previous experience on a parallel earth, Ramon has provided an easy and portable ticket home. He even sent along extras in case there was anyone else that needed tagging along. If this man was so worried about a few stragglers that needed safe passage, Len could give him the extras keys and be gone. There was nothing tying Len down to stick around as his bodyguard. 

Still, he walked after Tolly as he considered this, never letting up the pace or hesitating until they came upon a damn creek and Len realizes how deep into these unknown woods they are.

“Nearly there,” Tolly mutters, certainly more to himself than for Len’s benefit. 

He doesn’t say a word as he crosses the creek, slippery stone after slippery stone, and they find themselves walking through the overgrown lawns of long abandoned houses. Which is just about when Len decides he’s had enough of this.

“You may be right, I’m in no killing mood – but I’m also not in a helping one. So you’re going to sell me on what exactly I’m doing here or you can enjoy the free ride home and consider me gone.”

The expression of rage on Tolly’s face couldn’t fairly be compared to Bart’s – nor even Barry’s. There is something uniquely stony and determined, present-minded and clear about the way the man glares daggers through Len’s head. 

“There is no peace in concealment, nor life to be lived in shame. I will name my mother in pride and I will hold my lover in lust – and if it be death for it then it is a different kind of blessing,” he recites, because Len can tell words committed to memory when he hears them.

“Strong words,” Len hums.

“Your words,” Tolly spits back, “but not yours at all. Those were his final words before he was put to death on the square we just crossed. For sympathies with the bedeviled, they said, but for being of mismatched blood and for having a man in his bed. He was everything they loath and they killed him for it. They killed them all. I was seven years old when I saw them splay his blood on that wall. He died a martyr, a hero. I can see that you’re not. But your face will bring a few people strength to come away from this madness – from this endless hunt - if you care to help. But make no mistake, Cold, we don’t need any brave hero’s saving. Never did meet one who did anything but take a bullet for his pains.”

Len stands quietly in his spot as the man strides forward and then breaks into a run, one he can catch up with so easily it startles him to see Barry-Bart-Tolly look so human. Tolly drops into a crouch by a storm shelter door and taps out a simple code. His shoulders tense as the minutes run in silence, with no rustling and no response. When he taps it out a second time against the splintered door, Len can see the trembling in the other man’s bones.

It takes another minute and a half of deafening silence before a soft shy knock comes in response. 

“Oh, Miss Baez, thank the Lord,” Tolly whispers, head sagging forward onto the storm shelter door. A moment later the door is pried open, and a face Len recognizes vaguely from a long-forgotten news report appears. The woman throws her arms around Tolly’s neck, sobbing deeply. 

“Heaven keep you, rotten bastard, you no-good… I thought you dead. I’ve spent sleepless nights turning over how I would tell her that you weren’t going to come home.”

“Of course, I’ve come, I…”

The woman lets go of Tolly’s neck to look down into the darkness of the shelter, somewhere down by her feet. Tolly scrambles on hands and knees, practically diving into the space beneath. 

“Let me see you,” he whispers, in a voice that Len recognizes as steeped deep with emotion, “let me see you, baby girl.”

He allows himself the fantastic privilege of blaming the gravity of a foreign universe for the way in which he stumbles back, calf-like and stunned from the scene unfolding. He watches in an inevitable slow motion as Tolly reaches into the darkness and pulls up a tiny slip of a child, with baby smooth skin that looks pillow-soft and seems to shine almost silver under the warm brown of her cheeks.

In a world which Len has seen little of he finds that he has been convinced of its brokenness by the sight of the girl’s smile alone, the way it sparkles in undeniable contrast to the heartbreak in Tolly’s grin. 

“What a sight for sore-eyes you are, little miss,” he whispers, nose touching nose with her. When the world tilts again, Len does himself the favor of admitting it to himself, of not blaming gravity for the pull the man’s eyes have on him.

“Daddy,” the child giggles in whisper, pressing her tiny fingers into that unkempt beard, “daddy's home.”


	2. Chapter 2

Holding the child tightly to his chest, Tolly stands and extends his arm to help the woman out of her hiding place.

“Miss Baez, there’s someone I want you to meet,” he says smiling brightly.

It gives Len whiplash, the speed at which this man can affect his own moods, almost as quickly as his counterparts could race against light.

The woman looks at him curiously, eyes squinting as if she were trying to place him.

“This is Leonard Snart. I found him. I found it. A place to live without constant fear, without targets on our backs.”

The kid is an excellent liar, Len has to give him that. She turns back to him with wide eyes, filled with recognition at last.

“It is… oh Lord, it is you! Mama kept clippings – but it’s impossible.”

“It’s true, Miss Baez. This isn’t the man we grew up hearing about, but there is a world of opportunities – a world of heroes who fight for justice – and I can take us there.”

She stands frozen, glancing back and forth between a cautiously silent Len and the man beside her who has turned his attention back to the child he holds. He rocks the girl hardly older than five if a day, and whispers things to her that makes her giggle and clap.

The woman’s eyes harden after a moment as if a new and uncomfortable thought has come to mind.

“This is witchcraft, Tol. You said you were going to search for safer ground and now you come talkin’ of other worlds and walkin’ with dead men?”

“There are those who call it witchcraft, yes. And yet others call it science, divine gifts, magic – I care very little what it’s called but for what it can accomplish.”

“Tol, please tell me you didn’t… tell me this didn’t all start by going past the pines to the bedeviled.”

“Don’t you call them that,” Tolly snaps, startling a frown from the little one in his arms.

“Daddy says it’s a mighty mean word to call a person, Miss Baez.”

“Your daddy has bad ideas and a stubborn streak to fight a mule with,” the woman chides the girl, “and whatever you call them you had no business –“

“They cannot help what they are born any more than you can help the color of your skin and they are not evil – how can you judge them just as you are judged—”

“Do not preach to me on the color of my skin, Bartholomew,” she hisses back, “you mind your own trouble.”

The man has the good sense to look apologetic but has no time to speak before she turns on Len. “What of he says is true?”

Len looks back and forth between them making a quiet choice to keep a middle ground as long as he is in the dark.

“Can’t tell you how he made his way into my world. Can’t tell you it’s a world where your skin or any given difference won’t matter. But… there are heroes. And there are people who don’t relent in the good fight, just as I’m sure there are here,” he says, his eyes slanting toward Barry’s double.

She takes a deep breath and clenches her fists a couple of times at her side before rounding back on Tolly.

“If you did consult with the … with the people behind the pines, you should know that a couple of them were discovered and their names publicly announced from the Fountain just a few days ago.”

Tolly pulls the girl all the tighter to his chest, his face breaking into anguish.

“Hartley,” he gasps out.

“Unca Hart got in trouble,” the little one mumbles while tugging at a ribbon on her shirt. “They called him bad things on the square.”

Miss Baez holds out her hands in a sign of calm. “The Rathaways plead their case with plenty of money and promised to have him dealt with by their hand. I cannot say what state he is in, but last I heard he is alive and held in a monastery in Starling.”

“Who else?”

“No names I recognized, Tol. Had I known that you…had any business with them at all I might have payed attention. But I prayed for their souls nonetheless, God keep them.”

“They’re…”

“Not Rathaways,” she says, “and no one of that standing to plead for mercy.”

 Tolly takes a long deep breath and sets the girl down.

"Baby girl, daddy has to go away again... just for a couple of days."

"No, daddy, no!"

"I'm so sorry, petal, but I promise I won't be gone so long. I swear. There's just one more thing I have to do and then we’ll go together somewhere new. You and I will go to the park—"

"But, daddy, I can't play in the park."

"You will there, you'll love this, baby girl. We can go to the park together, to the fair, the zoo - remember, like we saw in the city?"

"Where the animals live?"

"That's right, petal, and you'll go to school with lots of other children—"

"REALLY?!"

"Really, petal. But first I need to go get Uncle Hart to come with us. He helped me find this place, and it's only fair he gets to come to the zoo as well, don't you think? Now promise me you'll keep being a good little lady for Miss Baez. Wash up before dinner and say your prayers before bed."

"Yes, daddy," the little girl says, her tiny voice sad and excited all at once, "I promise."

"I'll see you soon, petal," he whispers, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

He looks up at Baez - Shawna, Len finally remembers - and shares a silent nod with her.

"Baby girl," he says with a smile again, "will you lend me your prayer beads?"

As soon as the little girl nods and scampers off into her rabbit hole, Tolly turns to Len with an outstretched arm. “I need to know they can get there without us.”

“You just swore to your daughter that they wouldn’t have to,” Len replies, trying to keep his face impassive despite it all.

 “That’s my business,” Tolly snaps, “I know Cisco gave you half a dozen of those things, give them over.”

The stare each other down and Len can see the hardness creeping back into the other man’s eyes. He’s nearly tempted to drive him into a fury to see if his skin might prickle like a storm the way Bart’s ... but there’s no sense in pretending that Len will let that woman and child stay in a world where public executions are as common as they seem to be here. He fishes out two transporters which he hands to Shawna himself. The woman eyes them warily, taking a step back from them and him.

“Take them,” he says, making sure to keep his eyes on hers, “it’s a chance, not a guarantee. It isn’t a perfect world, but there’s more than this for you there. More for her.”

Shawna splays her hands open under his, like accepting Communion, Len realizes. He sets both gently in her hands.

“Put one round your neck, one around hers. You need only press one and hold her tight, but keep both in case,” he instructs. He glances at Tolly and sees gratitude there.

“Wait for us three days if you can,” Tolly says to Shawna, “but if there is any trouble, any trouble at all – don’t hesitate. We’ll find our way to you.”

Shawna nods, and Tolly takes a step closer.

“There is man there… my twin. As Leonard is the Commander’s. He is a good man, a kind man, and he will look after you both without self-interest. You can trust him.”

“Daddy, I found them!”

The change in Tolly’s face shakes Len down to his bones. How many men wear this face and… would Len be doomed to them all?

“Thank you so much, baby girl. I just know with these I’ll be back in no time at all.”

The girl wraps her arms tight around his neck as he lifts her again.

“I’ll be countin’, mister,” she says, wagging a little finger right in front of his face.

Tolly grins at his daughter with frightening honesty. “I wouldn’t dream of being late.”

XXXX

Len sits quietly beside Shawna as Tolly slips into their makeshift hiding place to pack supplies with his daughter.

His daughter.

After the shock of finding Bart a god-like ruler of a nightmare world, one would think something as simple as a young man with a child wouldn’t be so disconcerting.

“Mama kept clippings,” Shawna says quietly again after some time. “She was a big believer in Commander Cold. She always said she knew his mama when they were girls. That’s what made them angry, ya know, military man – a man of the law, lookin’ like you do. To be so loud and proud of his mama being black? Drove them nuts. They put up with it though, until they found out about his lover. Then about all the people he’d been hiding using his name and title.”

The woman beside him plucks grass from beneath her and pulls it to shreds between her fingers.

“It’s all wrong, I know it – most good people do. But you won’t find anyone who says so anymore. Just run scared of each other, hide,” she says, pointing to the storm shelter door, “try to stay out of underfoot so we can grow old. It’s so hard to be the right kinda person for them, so easy to be told you’re the wrong kind.”

Len wonders who ‘them’ is in this world, but he has an idea, since those types exist in his world too. Some days it feels like home has come so far, no one needs to hide. People can be any color or creed with whatever inclinations that suit them, and it’s often celebrated. Other times, though, Len knows, there are echoes of this kind of hate even there.

He hopes it could never be like this back home. He believes. Heroes like Barry would never allow it.

“Like I said, my world isn’t paradise, don’t let him sell you on that, but it’s better than here. Don’t let him sell you on me being _Commander_ Cold either. I’m no hero.”

“Then why come all this way, following Tol like you’d rise up just like that old ghost?”

Len’s gut clenches because he’s a ghost some days too. “I’m no hero, but you don’t have to be one to know when someone good deserves better than what they’ve been given. I have a little sister. Not so little now, but I raised her, remember her being that small. You’d have to be a different kind of evil to let all the hits land on a face like that.”

“No one is ever touching her,” Tol returns a step ahead of his daughter, assuming Len had been speaking only of her perhaps. “Ever. Soon, baby girl,” he shifts like sand again, like ripples of water, like every element other than lightning, as he turns to her clamoring after him. “A few days. Then we’re all starting a brand new life.”

XXXX

Len never much cared for Starling. He certainly doesn’t care for the time it’ll take to walk there, and Tolly isn’t the warmest of company now that the façade has shattered. Isn’t forthcoming, isn’t chatty, has a one-track mind and no time for Len slowing him down. At least that last part is familiar.

For the first few leagues, Len allows it, giving himself the chance to get a lay of the land, work out calculations of what this world really is, what the Fountain likely is, why Tolly is the way he is. The girl though, his daughter, she’s not Shawna’s, that’s clear, but there’s a glaringly obvious answer to who her mother must have been that hardens Len’s gut more than he can say.

He doesn’t have the right to be disappointed. Tolly played him, looked at him with hero-worship he doesn’t actually feel, and Len fell for it, for the chance to have that face, that boy, just once, look at him the way he always ends up looking at somebody else.

“It’s dark, I’m tired, and at some point we need to make camp and rest,” Len says, always a step behind Tolly and those long strides. “You expect me to get up come sunrise or earlier and keep following you without pushing my own ticket home, you better start explaining.”

“Isn’t the rest clear enough?” Tolly doesn’t turn to look at him, following a path through the thick woods like he’s gone this route a dozen times or more.

“Oh I get it. Anyone with darker skin than yours or sexual tendencies closer to _mine_ either gets the noose or reeducated, am I right?”

“Shot,” Tolly clarifies, “it’s not quite against the law to be anything but white it’s just in practice – it’s better to live in the country and hidden. Lots of other things to get put in a Fountain and shot for though – sexualities, religions, those with abilities too.”

“Metas?”

“Whatever you call them. Here they call them the bedeviled.”

“So I heard. Witchcraft. How 17th century of you. And you want to save them all?”

“They don’t all want to be saved,” Tolly slows maybe half a pace, voice low and steady, his attention ever on his surroundings, “but one sent me through to your world so I could save myself.”

“Cisco?”

“No. Like him maybe. _She_ wasn’t as nice and it wasn’t as straight of a shot. There were many places I could have turned, many places I could have ended up, if it hadn’t been for that light – that beacon. There are a few others. I’ll take as many as I can from here if they’ll come. No more hiding. No more scrounging in the dirt.”

“Better to run then?”

Tolly whirls around at the challenge—Len meant it as one. He’s not used to a version of this boy who’s a coward. That’s not what Tolly is, but he’s no more a hero than Len, but no king or god or whatever else Bart was, and it unnerves Len to not really understand him.

He understands fury though, and that still springs to life just fine, a nerve struck.

“Always. Those who don’t run or can’t end up like the man with your face.”

It feels more personal than Tolly means it, because Tolly doesn’t know Len either, not really, but he cuts quick as if he does, sharper than Barry but with reason Bart lacked.

Len needs to stop comparing them, but it’s an impossible thing to ask of himself. Same face and drive and fierce devotion to those he loves. What did Tolly lose, Len wonders, though he has a strong guess.

Only that seems wrong, because…

Because he knows what Barry looks like when he loses the love of his life. Bart made sure to save Iris so the same wouldn’t happen in Len’s world. If Tolly’s sane…

Something doesn’t add up. Was Bart wrong in thinking that any version of himself would go mad with grief? Is it that he has a child to keep his mind busy?

Len’s thoughts are interrupted by Tolly’s plans.

“We get Hartley. We return. We gather anyone we can before we are found, and we use your tickets to freedom. Your being here will convince some people. This is all they know, but the last they heard of ‘fight’ and ‘hope’ was from the man that looked like you. That’s all I ask. When we return to your world, you never have to see me again.” Tolly spins back around to continue on without waiting for Len’s agreement or any reply at all. He’ll go alone if he has to – has had to most of his life maybe. Maybe that much was the truth.

Len doesn’t push his button home—yet. He tells himself this is just a mission, like with the Legends. No attachment, just a job. Breaking in and breaking out is what he’s good at, what he’s good for. But he can’t fall for his own lie even if he is an accomplished liar, as silver tongued as Tolly.

Bart was a storyteller. He could sit on his throne or splay on his bed and weave you a tale from passionate beginning to inevitable tragedy, which was how Len had learned not only of Bart and Leo’s love but about the torrid affair between that Mick and that Hartley and about the doomed union between Lisa and Rosa.

Barry is a pep talker. Sometimes he looks at you, looks into you, and makes you believe the best of everyone is possible. Sure, most of the time he’s looking at someone else – the man has a legion of friends and a wife he adores– but when he looks at Len… when he looks at Len it’s easier to believe in himself.

Again, Tolly isn’t much of a talker. After they stop, Len knows that he’s lying wide awake beside him and still the man won’t speak unless challenged or provoked. Maybe it’s born of a world built on snitching and surveillance, or maybe he’s a man of few words, but all Len can hear is the clinking of prayer beads that eventually lull him to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Len takes in the structure rising in the horizon and lets out a low whistle.

“Even in the best of circumstance a place like that takes a week of planning and three days of screw ups to get in and out of, kid.”

Tolly turns to stare at him with unmasked exasperation, “We’re not breaking into that. The Starling Fountain is one of the biggest this side of the Atlantic. The place Hart is at isn’t fortified it’s just…forgotten.”

“What exactly goes on in these Fountains? I mean, since it seems we stand a chance of being thrown in one on this little rescue mission.”

Tolly frowns but he must decide that it’s true enough because he answers.

“They take the accused to be purified, they try to drive out the devil by whatever means possible. When they’re done,” Tolly stops and closes his eyes tightly for a second before he continues, “what’s left of them gets taken out to the town square and shot – unless their family is wealthy and influential enough to have them cloistered with monks and nuns instead. They stay there, imprisoned for the rest of their days.”

“Guess your friend got lucky then.”

“None of us are lucky,” Tolly says without any bite, “but at least he’s not dead.”

“He must be important to you,” Len says, “if you’re willing to leave your kid behind again.”

“Hart’s the only reason she and I have a chance – I can’t leave him, not like this. It’s more of a risk than I want to take, yes, but…” Tolly stops again, clearly struggling with himself, “I just can’t.”

“We better be real careful then, don’t think the monks will take warmly to me. I am many things _they_ don’t like.”

“But you hide it so well,” Tolly says with an almost mischievous smile, “if only you weren’t so heroic, you could be high up in their ranks.”

“A commander even,” Len says with a smirk in return.

The boy chuckles, Len thinks it even sounds honest.

“Let’s get going,” Tolly says with a sigh, “I want to get back to my girl.”

-

They find the boy in a garden, roaming about with a freshly and harshly shaved head. Len can see the red lines and scabs of a blunt blade and an angry barber. About them, other men in robes like the ones they procured go about picking up different herbs from the garden though the boy himself seems only to pick at some plants and caress the leaves of others.

Tolly knew the layout, but it was up to Len to get them through unseen. At a glance, a few extra bodies are easy to ignore, as long as they aren’t seen moving in or out, but the boy’s disappearance would be noticed. Their mission for now is simply to give him a message to be ready.

Tolly looks at Len and he understands the pause in them. It’ll do them no good to startle this kid with a strange face he might have seen in a newspaper once, so Len keeps an eye on the monks that surround them and let’s Tolly approach young Mr. Rathaway instead.

“Brother,” he hears Tolly whisper. Len wonders if there is joy in the silence that follows. When he hears Tolly’s voice again, there is something mixed in with the sadness, a horror and an anger. “The most precious blooms are best picked at midnight,” he whispers, so softly that even if he’d plainly told the boy to meet them by the gate, no one would have heard.

When Len hazards a glance, he watches as the boy nods very abruptly.

It takes an honest effort for Len to keep up with Tolly after that as the monastery fades behind them and they make their way back to their little camp.

“Is there a problem I should know about?” he finally asks, once they reach their things and Tolly promptly begins to ram his entire parcel of provisions into the nearest tree.

“The fucking bastards, they’re sick. They’re agents of the devil they so proclaim to fight. They –“

“Bartholomew,” Len snaps, since it seemed to work for Shawna to break the man out of a rant.

“They chopped off his hand,” Tolly roars at him, “they cut it from the wrist – the left which they say is best corrupted by the devil. His tender hand that tended to my daughter, that could play ivory melodies into your heart. They chopped it off like the unwanted bits of a pig at the butcher’s block.”

“There is nothing you could have done,” Len reminds him.

The sentiment doesn’t seem to calm Tolly at all and he turns from Len, practically growling in frustration and pulling at his hair.

“You’ll go back with him,” Tolly declares, a smidge of madness that should not thrill Len’s heart creeping into his words, “the moment that we free him, you’ll take him back. Shawna knows to leave without us past three days, I’ll get as many people as I can, I’ll kidnap them if need be –“

“Listen, kid,” Len says, slow and drawn out so as to make himself understood, “you haven’t got a plan and you’re going to get yourself and that handless little monk and your girlfriend and your daughter all killed if you don’t come up with one and stick to it.”

“I’ve just said-“

“You’ve just been dealt a blow. You thought everything would be dandy while you went window shopping for a new home and you come back to your kid in hiding and your …friend imprisoned and mutilated. You’re emotional. Understandable, but dangerous. Now, since you’ve made the rash decision of bringing me here under false pretenses to help you, why don’t you damn well allow me to help.”

“Fine,” Tolly spits out, “what do you suggest?”

Len stands and approaches the seething man, “I know your…type. Guilt will consume you into madness if you don’t save the people you love. So, make a list. Not of who would be happier or safer, we’ll be here all our lives if you try it. Make it a harsh and unforgiving list-“

“I cannot traipse around the country picking up strays while my daughter is in danger,” Tolly says, leaning close and menacing towards Len.

“There you are. Harsh and unforgiving. We’ve already come too far when your list is one name long. What is her name, by the way?”

“Edith,” Tolly answers, voice gentle again, “Edith Anne.”

“Little Edith is waiting for her father to take her somewhere he’s promised is perfect, because little Edith’s father is a fucking liar. But here we are. Now keep your eye on the damn prize. We’re going to pluck this little flower of the Lord out of that convent-“

“Monastery-“

“And we are going to go right back to the girls and we’re all pressing our golden tickets home.”

“How can you say that, there are so many others-“

“But there aren’t, are there? Gun to your head,” Len snarls, “your kid or the world?”

Len can see the battle behind Tolly’s eyes and he aches almost immediately to give the other man comfort. But Tolly’s eyes go hard and full of tears all at once.

“There is no world but Edith,” he says, with a tremble in his voice.

Len cannot help it, cannot stop his hand as it reaches out and his finger catches a tear on its way down Tolly’s cheek.

“There’s no shame in not being a hero,” Len whispers, “and it does not make you a monster. Trust me. I’ve seen you be both.”

They keep their silence until night falls and Tolly begins a ritual of looking over his pocket watch again and again. Once the time is near but not near enough, to pass the time that remains perhaps, he asks Len a question.

“Do you know a Hartley?”

“Met one or two before. Passionate, headstrong boys,” Len comments, “Eager to please.”

Tolly’s lip quirks at the corner, “Sounds about right.”

“You said you owe this one everything,” Len prompts.

He hums in answer and Len wonders if that’s all there will be. Eventually he hears a deep intake of breath and a chuckle.

“It was idle talk until it wasn’t,” Tolly says, “the rumors of a gifted one that could open doors to places beyond. As soon as I heard, I didn’t care where those doors opened to, I just wanted… I just needed – there was a hope of escape. Hart’s gift is… beautiful. In a world where things make sense, he would never be lonely, you see… he only has to dig his fingers into the Earth and the back of his eyelids light up like a map. If any like him are nearby, he can know, he can hear-see the tenor of the power.”

“That’s…convenient.”

“Yes… well they only took the one hand,” Tolly reminds him, “doubtless they’re trying their best to make use of the other.”

“You know it’s a literal stroll in the gardens getting out of that place. Why couldn’t this boy just-“

“And go where?” Tolly snaps. “Don’t you see? I’m running away because there is nowhere left in this world. Would you have him turn to the family that considers him a shame and locks him in a prison? Or to the woods to fend for himself when all his friends have been shot dead? We have so little to hold on to, only each other. And even then, our lists are harsh and unforgiving.”

Len hears his own words echo back at him over and over again until they are at the monastery gates, which he makes quick and silent work of. The boy materializes out of the shadows and straight into Tolly’s arms, which wrap around him like a vice.

“Quick,” Len hisses at them, “there’ll be time for this, now let’s get.”

Both of them nod and Len tries to make out the face of the lovesick fool or the heartbroken heir but can see neither. Only a boy with their face and innocence in his eyes and a stump for an arm.

When they reach their camp, he can see the desire in both boys to collapse, perhaps into each other, but there is no time. Hartley’s absence will have church bells ringing soon, and the faster they can be on the other side of an interdimensional portal, all the better. After a few hours, the silence is finally broken by the rescued man.

“Edith?” Hartley says in a voice that sounds rough with disuse.

“Anxious to see her uncle,” Tolly answers as they walk steadily with their arms linked, “and excited for her new home.”

Hartley stops then and turns. With the benefit of the moonlight, he squints towards Len, “The Commander?”

“Your Commander’s still dead,” Len huffs out as he takes the next hill with more gusto, “but your buddy seems to think I help the sales pitch.”

The boy says nothing but turns to Tolly in likely disbelief.

“It is not a perfect world,” Len hears Tolly admit, perhaps for the first time to himself, “but it is a world where we can live as we are.”

Hartley’s answering hum turns melodic and before Len knows it, there is singing, soft and mournful and edged in a blurred copy of happiness.

“Come as you are, as you were,” Hartley’s rough voice sings only to be answered by Tolly’s sweet one.

“As I want you to be.”

Len snorts, “You don’t have basic human rights but you have Nirvana?”

The younger men turn to him with twin confusion on their faces.

“The song,” Len clarifies, but there is no clarity in their expressions.

“It’s an old country tune,” Tolly answers, “my mama used to sing it.”

He’s not quite sure what to say to that, except to wonder at what the powers that be will and won’t keep constant.

They don’t get the luxury of sleeping this time like Len and Tolly did on the way there. If they rest and they’re caught up to, they’re finished. It’s many hours later with eating provisions on the run that they finally near the storm shelter where they left the girls.

Len isn’t sure of the time but the sun is up at least. He’s moving on pure adrenaline, but he’s used to that. He can tell the others are as well, maybe even more so than him.

As soon as they’re within view of the shelter door, Tolly’s pace picks up, and he might as well be a speedster for how quickly he crosses the grass to reach his daughter. Len overtakes Hartley and catches up to Tolly first, about the third time he’s tapped out the same rhythmic code as before.

“Miss Baez, you best be sleeping or long gone with my girl if you don’t answer,” he says with a hitch in his voice.

“Daddy?” the little girl answers instead of Shawna.

Tolly throws the door open, which should have been locked from the other side but isn’t, and reaches inside to pull his daughter into the light. Hartley drops down beside them, hugging them both like being reunited with this sweet child is being reunited with Tolly again too, like Tolly isn’t whole without her.

“Unca Hart!” she hugs him back gleefully.

“Where’s Miss Baez, baby girl?” Tolly asks.

Her face is more smudged, hair less tightly bound, and Len swears he hears her tiny tummy rumble from hunger like the last bit of food was gone, and for a moment he wonders if Shawna was a terrible coward, took everything, and ran. It would almost bother him that he always thinks the worst of people, but he’s usually right.

This time he isn’t. 

“She left when it was dark. Heard bad men comin’, Daddy. Said to stay hid. Stay quiet. Said she’d lead ‘em away so they wouldn’t find me. Said you’d come and we’d find her. And you did come, Daddy, you did.” She throws her arms around his neck and squeezes with all her strength. “We’re gonna go save her too, now, right Daddy? Like Unca Hart?”

 _Harsh and unforgiving_ , Len hears in his head once more when Tolly’s head lifts from his daughter’s shoulder and he looks at Len dead in the eyes.

 _Shit_.


	4. Chapter 4

Len sees the indecision in Tolly’s eyes to take their ticket to a new home and run while the getting’s good and betray what Len can only assume is a binding friendship with Baez or take the risk of never getting out of here by embarking on yet another rescue mission.

“Yes, petal, of course we’ll rescue her,” Tolly lies as flawlessly as ever. “I’ll try ever so hard to find her, but you need to go with the Mr. Snart now so he can take you and Uncle Hart somewhere safe.”

“Not happening,” Len says. He made up his own share of lies to a little girl once. “You plan on throwing this all away on a fool’s errand—”

“You don’t know—” Tolly assumes Len means to shoot down his rescue attempt, solo or otherwise.

“—then we’re _all_ going, coz no way this doesn’t end in madness, but at least together we have a better chance of getting out.”

The little girl puts a hand on her father’s cheek to turn his attention back to her.

“Daddy?”

“One minute, petal.” Tolly passes Edith to Hartley and she clings to him almost as tightly as she had her father, little hands smoothing over Hartley’s roughly shaven head. The man balances the kid on his mutilated arm and Len doesn’t need to see the repressed wince on his face to know intimately how much that gesture must hurt, but it keeps her from seeing the injury.

Tolly’s face changes the second Len is the only one who can see it, and suddenly he’s stalking forward, forcing Len to back up.

“I am not taking my daughter to the shooting gallery. If Miss Baez is gone then she’s caught, they’ll press any charge they can conjure up against her and a quick death will be a mercy from what they’ll do if they decide to toy with her instead. We all go, we’re walking into that square right where another man with your face spilled his blood. You so eager to do the same?”

“Are you?” Len fires back with equal challenge. “Harsh and unforgiving, remember? What’s that little girl have left with you and Baez gone? Rathaway? Well that’s just dandy. He’ll make a fine father, but how’s his tale spinning? Coz I imagine that soft-spoken version back there isn’t much of a liar. He can hardly hide the pain he’s in from her, how’s he gonna hide the pain of the world? Edith Anne is going to love hearing some of those glass houses you keep building shatter.”

Tolly rises up like he’d fight Len right there in the grass, in this world that’s all about tatters and quarrels and someone losing. But that’s the thing when you never stop fighting. You get tired. Tolly doesn’t have that rechargeable battery like Barry or Bart. He deflates and his eyes look worn again like he’s never slept his whole damn life, not deeply.

“Me and my girl would be dead and buried ten times over without Miss Baez and Hart both. You want a harsh and unforgiving list, we gotta save one more. Just her. We manage a few more, thank the Lord, but if we don’t, we run. But you promise me,” he grabs Len by the front of his shirt, like he means to threaten, but that too turns desperate and looks more like begging, “you promise you won’t let anything happen to _her_.”

To Edith, his daughter. With the rest he has to try, even himself is only worth a try, but Edith is non-negotiable.

And Len, well, he’s a liar too, has been most his life, but he won’t promise this.

“Gather what you need and be ready to move, coz we’re going to have to do this fast.”

 

\-----

 

The walk through the woods would almost be nice if there wasn’t a planned execution at their destination. Len is impressed by Edith but not surprised with how well she knows to keep quiet, no matter how tired or hungry or scared. She steps quick and careful not to crunch any dead grass or twigs under her feet.

Survival, learned young. Len hates that, because he knew it too, but she’s young enough maybe that she might be able to unlearn it again before it becomes her whole life.

The powers that be—whether the Lord or Fate or the damn twists of Time, Len doesn’t know—are smiling on them enough that the gunshots haven’t gone off yet when they get to the square. It’s as big a crowd as Len has yet seen in this world, besides the monks. Other than the six unfortunate people bound and on their knees in the square, including Miss Baez, there are eight men in simple uniforms that have a grey Fatherland feel to them, plain and drab but in nicer shape than anything Len’s seen on the people here, and there are a couple dozen townsfolk to watch, though no one looks happy about it.

Maybe some of them just got out of the Fountain themselves, ready to turn over their lives to one of those monasteries, and this is their final kick in the gut to remind them why they won’t submit to the pistol, if they’re lucky enough to not have to. It’s a crowd, though, and that actually helps Len with his plan.

He, Tolly, Hartley, and little Edith are all hidden in the woods close enough to the square that they can see it and make a run for it to cause commotion and save the day. But that means having eight guns pointed at them once they make themselves known, and Len is the only one armed and he doesn’t have bullets and there are no speedsters along that can dodge them or catch them midair. This will require precision and an improvised plan.

Len’s specialty.

Shock value and a good show can do wonders.

“Be ready to move in and grab as many of them as you can. Get ‘em all if you can. I’ll keep the eyes on me.”

“What?” Tolly looks nervous for Len’s sake for the first time, maybe more so because his daughter is with them and Len is nice insurance, but Len knows he can handle this.

“You brought me here to help. This is how I help. Now do as I say and we might just manage to make it out of here as the big damn heroes you thought I was when you tricked me into coming.”

“Big damn heroes?” Edith repeats.

Right. Impressionable ears. But Tolly merely sighs.

“You stick close to your daddy, little petal. We’re gonna make sure Miss Baez makes it to that new world too.”

Len isn’t certain, but he’s confident in his plan, confident enough that he doesn’t allow Tolly to dissent and steps out of the woods at a steady, confident pace right toward those guns starting to raise as one of the soldiers recites something practiced but that he’s clearly bored with now, having killed too may undesirables in his time.

“For those who dally with the bedeviled or are such wayward souls themselves can only be saved through the grace of God. Today…” he trails as he spots Len calmly walking toward the square in his parka, looking much like Commander Cold, as Tolly asked of him. For a moment, the soldier is as frozen as if Len had shot him dead, but then he shouts, “Incoming!” and all the others turn toward where he’s looking—at Len—and point their guns.

But they don’t fire, and that is all that matters.

“Howdy, folks,” Len says with the barest hint of the accent he’s heard from Tolly these past few days, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He keeps his pace, doesn’t slow or pick it up, simply waits for a few of the crowd or the soldiers to recognizes who he is. Or at least who he resembles.

And it’s only after the first gasp that he grins and lets the cold gun whir with power, bright and blue. Whether Commander Cold had something similar or not, it makes most of the crowd back up and the soldiers stare.

“Hardly seems like a fair fight. You with guns. Them all bound and helpless.”

Len feels rather than sees that Tolly and Hartley with Edith carried close are moving around to creep up on the poor bedeviled folks to untie them, so all he needs to do is keep the focus on him.

“Who are you?” the leader asks. “State your business and your rank.”

“Pretty sure you know both of those. Or did you not get a good look at this profile? Want to test what this does?” He lifts the gun higher and lets it charge a little more visibly. “Coz I am feeling a _chill_ in the air tonight.”

The guns quiver but eventually center on him like they might finally fire. Tolly is sneaking up behind Miss Baez now, and it’s only a few of the onlookers who notice. No one gives any warning cry, as Len expected.

“You can try to fire, but do you think those guns will work on me? Didn’t the first time, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Sorcery!” one of the soldiers cries out.

“You want to stick your hand in my side to prove I’m real, kid, you come right over,” he says, taking one step forward himself so that the guns lift the inch or two they had fallen in their aim.

The soldier doesn’t move. Most of them are young. Doesn’t make them any more innocent, but it makes Len wonder what might have been if they’d had better influences. All middle road white boys, straight if they’re smart, anything else they would hide here, and no metas among them. They’re ‘perfect’. Stupid and scared.

“No takers? You hardly seem like the men in charge, so maybe you can send a message for me and no one needs to meet their maker tonight.”

One itchy trigger finger looks ready to fire, so Len fires first, just close enough to singe a few hairs with ice so cold it burns, and everyone stands at straighter attention. Their eyes are all on him and not on the fact that Tolly and Hartley have four of the six prisoners untied now and more than enough markers to bring them all back to Earth-1. Len’s is in his free hand, ready and waiting.  

“You tell them…” He jumps up on what might have been a monument once but now it’s just a rock, elevated three yards from the nearest boy with a gun. He thinks of what Tolly recited to him and tries to paraphrase something similar. “There is no peace in concealment or life to be lived in shame,” he says, and looks right at the soldier in charge, young as he is like all the rest. “You didn’t think you’d gotten rid of me that easily, did you?”

The hearts of several dozen people stop, and Len sees his cue, because everyone is free, and everyone has a way out of there seconds before one of the soldiers thinks to turn and sees that their prey is about to escape.

“Hey!”

“While it’s been a blast, folks,” Len says, firing a wide ray of cold above the heads of the soldiers, enough to make them duck and cover and for a few to lose their guns.

He drops down from his perch in the same moment he’s fired and snatches up one of the lost guns, tossing it to a civilian. Tolly is still there, but the others have all blipped away, having pressed their buttons to freedom. He’s waiting on Len, but Len does like to make as dramatic an exit as his entrance.

“It’s time to _fight_ ,” he says to the woman he gives the gun, before he presses his own button home and flees.

At least it made for a good show.

\----

The inescapable nausea of interdimensional travel almost gets the best of Len as it mixes with the adrenaline of a couple of guns to the face, but he recovers quickly and takes inventory of those around him.

Hartley is still clutching Edi and Shawna, standing while the rest of the prisoners who have been thrown into a strange and confusing freedom all huddle together on the floor. Len counts a middle-aged couple with light brown skin and dark straight hair, two young girls with patterns of harsh bruises all over their skin, and a man with tattoos that apparently crawl over his skin like snakes.

He looks about them but no one from Team Flash seems to have made it down here yet and more importantly there is no Tolly anywhere.

“Daddy?” little Edith says, her face wet with tears likely caused by the abrupt and sickening jump her little body just made. “Where’s daddy?”

Len has barely spent a whole hour with the girl but he already chokes on the very thought of having to tell her that her daddy lied to her, that it was never a guarantee that he’d make it to this promised land by her side.

Just as he swallows the bile of that thought, the portal from where they crossed flashes again and Tolly stumbles out of it, eliciting a shriek from the little girl.

“Daddy!”

Completely unperturbed by the jump, Tolly runs over to her and plucks her out of Hartley’s arms, clutching her to his chest. He takes in a deep breath of her hair and looks up at Len over her head. He doesn’t say thank you or fuck you or anything at all, just looks at Len and –

“Snart! Tolly! You made it back!”

Len turns to see Ramon burst into the room at long last, watches the young man take stock of the group of refugees at his workplace and raise his hands into his long dark hair.

“Better call back-up, eh?”


	5. Chapter 5

Aware of just how quickly Barry can fill this room with confused and confusing faces, Len takes a step forward toward Ramon and extends his hands as if to calm an excited child.

“How about you and I get some of these people to the infirmary first. They’re malnourished at best, and I don’t wanna talk about the worst in front of impressionable ears.”

It seems that the younger man hadn’t taken full stock of the room because his eyebrows disappear into his hair.

“A baby! And Hartley? Is that Shaw-”

“Focus,” Len snaps, “we have injured and traumatized refugees on our hands. Be helpful and be quiet.”

Ramon looks mutinous for a few seconds before he nods and heads over to the group on the floor. Len trusts the man to be able to handle people in need of care, so he turns his attention to the ones he came with.

“You two need to get some medical attention,” Len tells Hart and Baez, “and the little one probably needs something to eat at the very least.”

The two nod and Len turns to Tolly who is still clutching his daughter with his eyes clenched shut.

“You,” Len says, sharp and quiet, “need to get your story straight before the cavalry arrives.” 

“I don’t know what you two are muttering about,” Ramon says as he approaches them with the tattooed man leaning on him and the two girls helped forward by the older couple, “but I need to get these people up to Caitlin and call the rest of the team in. Now bring that adorable little lady to the infirmary so we can check her vitals. You two alright?”

Len nods, tucking away the surprise of being asked and watching Tolly take a deep breath to hand the girl over to Shawna with a whisper.

“Tell Dr. Snow to prioritize Mr. Rathaway if everyone else is stable. I doubt anyone took any precautions during his…procedure,” Len tells Cisco, “and make sure everyone gets the space they need.”

Ramon nods looking sobered by all the implications, even without any idea of the kind of place these people had escaped.

Once everyone has followed the man out of the room and towards the infirmary, Len turns to Tolly who seems to have collapsed against the nearest column.

“Are you really alright or is that just another lie?”

“You seem very preoccupied with my dishonesty,” Tolly answers, eyes closed and sounding nothing but tired, “I have nothing to lie about any more. My daughter is safe, I did what I set out to do and I know that she’ll be protected. It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

“What exactly do you think is going to happen to you?”

“I took advantage of these people’s good faith, of your willingness to trust my face. I expect nothing from them or you.”

“You really don’t know shit about this world,” Len snaps before taking a breath. When he feels the crackle of lightning that lifts the hairs on the back of his hand, he doesn’t even bother to stand up straight.

“You’re back,” Barry nearly shouts with his face split into a grin, “and I saw all the people you rescued in the infirmary. You did it!”

“That we did,” Len drawls out, “now if you’ll excuse me I have showers and sleep to catch up on. Waverider wouldn’t happen to be around, would it?”

“It is, actually,” Iris says as she steps into the room yawning and trying to fix her Speedforce windswept hair. It must be rough being married to someone who occasionally wakes you in the middle of the night and sprints you across the city in your sleepwear, “the Legends are on leave for a wedding. It’s good to see both of you back.”

Len barely has time to care whose wedding it might be. “Always a pleasure, Mrs. West-Allen,” Len says with a nod, “now I think I’ll be on my way.”

“Wait, Caitlin hasn’t checked you out yet,” Barry says, “Tolly you as well-“

“I’m fine,” Len sighs.

“And we should debrief,” Barry insists, blocking his way.

“I think Tolly can take care of it,” Len says with bite.

“Barry,” Iris says softly, “it’s three in the morning and they’ve obviously been through hell.”

“And Snart will take advantage of all the people we have to look after and slip away, even though he’s probably injured or –“

“Or a grown man who can take care of himself,” Iris says with more strength, “get out of his way, Barr.”

Len watches her approach Tolly and observes the way he looks away from her, the way he’s always shied his eyes away from her. Now the reason for his shyness is even more evident, her tired voice echoing through the otherwise empty hallways. 

“You’re quiet,” Iris says gently.

“There’s a lot I need to confess,” Tolly says, without a trace of guilt, “and I don’t regret a bit of it.”

Len takes that as his cue to exit and nearly makes it to the elevators when a hand on his shoulder stops him and then promptly disappears.

“Stay,” Barry says, pleading slightly, “you don’t have to be a hero if you don’t want to be but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to take a breath and be taken care of when you do a hero’s work. Let Caitlin look you over, rest. Talk to me.”

“Listen to your wife, Barry,” Len says calling for the elevator, “get out of my way.”

“Snart!” Ramon shouts as if all his problems have been solved at the sight of him, “the little girl is asking for, and I quote, “Daddy or Mr. Snart”. And I got no clue who her daddy is.”

Len takes a deep breath, figures that Tolly is still explaining himself to Iris and that at the very least this will get Barry off his back. The other man is still standing silent and pleading but Len can’t stand to look at him right now. Instead he nods and follows Ramon over to the infirmary.

Most of the people laid out in cots seem to be either resting or sleeping, likely most of them are sedated – including Miss Baez. Len can’t catch sight of the injured Hartley, which means that Dr. Snow listened and must be working on a long untreated and likely barbaric wound. Sniffling and swinging her little legs, Len can see Edith curling away from Wells.

Len glares at him but carefully keeps his cool. “Why isn’t she sleeping?”

“Ah, Snart. She’s very young and not vaccinated. Dr. Snow insists that at least the basic inoculations be done immediately,” the man explains, holding a syringe without any grace at all.

“You’re scaring her,” Len says, making sure to keep his voice gentle as he approaches slowly. “You called for me, Miss Edith Anne?”

“Where’s Daddy?” she asks, small and terrified and yet so steady.

“He’s having a chat with the nice people here who have been waiting for us to come back,” Len says, “he’ll be right over. Now, I need you to be brave with me. Wells here is going to pinch you in the arm and it’s going to sting a little, but it’s going to make you strong and healthy.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Yes, a little,” he tells her - honesty always did seem to work with Lisa, “do you want to hold my hand?”

“Yes please, Mr. Snart,” she says quickly with several nods. Len holds out his hand to her and her little fingers wrap around the edge of his palm. He closes his fingers over hers and keeps talking to keep her distracted.

“As soon as your dad’s done talking and Wells here finishes, you’ll get to go and sleep as long as you want,” he murmurs as she winces at the first needle. Incredibly she doesn’t cry out or whine or even tear up any more than she already had, but only squeezes her little fingers in his hand.

“Will I sleep here? With Daddy?”

Len takes a look around as Wells applies a band-aid to her arm and proclaims her all set. The place isn’t what he’d call welcoming even though it’s obviously more comfort than little Edith has enjoyed in maybe all her life. Still, he thinks of her and Tolly curled up on these cots or on the couches in the lounge where he and Bart had once stayed and…

“No,” he tells her, “if the good doctor says it’s okay, you’re coming home with me.”

Len isn’t sure where that comes from, considering how ready he had been to be gone and maybe never see Tolly again—or Barry, if he could help it. Or anyone with that face. But the thought of leaving now sits heavier in his gut.

“Home with you?” Tolly’s voice breaches the confused quiet of Wells’ and Cisco’s reactions to the offer. Len can tell the difference between voices without looking behind him, more from just the faint Southern drawl, but all the weariness in Tolly’s tone compared to Barry.

“Daddy!” Edith reaches out for him without releasing Len’s hand, looking close to having jumped down from the hospital bed but recognizing it too high off the ground for her little legs to land safely.

Iris behind Tolly has a pinched and then shocked and anguished expression at the telling cry from the little girl, and Barry there too, at first wondering why his wife is upset, startles just the same, taking in Edith like a slap.

“Daddy…” he murmurs.

Tolly goes to Edith and hugs her close, adjusting around Len’s hand still caught in her grasp, which causes Tolly to glance at him with weary gratitude that Len was there when she needed someone. He might balk at Len’s offer for refuge tonight, but he’s going to want his own escape soon once the truth reaches everyone’s ears in the room, and Len still doesn’t know what all has been said to Iris.

Enough, it seems, because she’s whispering to Barry, and in barely enough time for Tolly to release his daughter from their embrace, Barry exclaims, “HE WHAT?”

Hand smoothing down his daughter’s arm to reach the one she has clasped with Len’s, Tolly dislodges them with a flick of his eyes Len’s direction again so he can lift the girl into his arms. It may be the first time there’s been a gentle touch or much of any touch between them, and Len can’t deny how it twists his stomach further with want he shouldn’t feel because it can’t lead anywhere good, no matter how every version of this boy enthralls him.

Then Tolly whispers, “Ask Miss West to leave.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Please.”

“Ask her yourself.” Len’s feeling vengeful then, though he regrets it after the deep look of loss that flashes through Tolly’s eyes before he masks it with his conman’s gait.  

"Look, petal, this is Uncle Barry," he turns at Barry’s approach, using the girl as a clever shield against the wrath brewing in the speedster.

"Put the kid down," Barry says through gritted teeth.

"She's tired," Tolly dismisses.

"You and I need to talk." Barry is outright threatening now.

"You haven't even greeted her properly."

Edith reaches out before Barry can respond, tiny hands grasping either side of his cheeks as boldly as she would have her father. She studies him closely before deciding, "Your face is naked, Unca Barry."

Len practically hears Barry’s whimper staring down such innocent sweetness. He smiles at her, pats her tiny hands on his cheeks, and tries to sound kinder as he says, “It is very nice to meet you, Miss…”

“Edith Anne,” she says proudly.

Barry melts before he slides his eyes to Tolly again. "You have a lot of explaining to do."

"Petal, show Uncle Barry your prayer beads"

"Look, Unca Barry,” she reaches into the pocket of her tattered dress to obey, “this is sai france."

"St. Francis, baby, go on, and who's that?"

" _Tolly_ ," Barry manages to glare with his voice.

"The girl is showing you her beads, _Allen_."

It’s another minute of that, with Barry seething but not wanting to show it in front of the child, before Edith notices Iris peeking around her husband’s shoulder and the moment Tolly had been dreading interrupts everything else like the air ran out of the room.

“Daddy, she looks just like Mama’s pictures! Is she Mama’s sister?”

Len feels his regret deepen for remaining a bystander, but all these lies were bound to catch up with Tolly eventually.

“Yes, petal, exactly,” Tolly lies without losing a step, despite the pain he must be feeling.

“What about Papa?”

Wait… _Papa?_

“He didn’t have a brother,” Tolly barely holds onto the resolve in his eyes, “not one I found here. I guess your Papa was one of a kind. You’re the only Edi around,” he says, and the way he says the nickname sounds like ‘Eddie’ just the same, like some twisted version of a ‘junior’.

“Eddie?” Iris gasps what Len is thinking. “But I thought… She calls you _Daddy_.”

“Daddy takes care ‘a me,” Edi says with that same unflinching pride, “but Mama and Papa made me. Daddy already esplain’d the birds and the bees.”

“Abridged,” Tolly says. “My friends have been gone a long time, since Edi was a baby. She’s my daughter now.”

Len doesn’t understand the flutter that springs to life in his stomach, but he thinks it is something like hope and relief, though it’s silly that he should care so much that Edi isn’t Tolly and Iris’s child.

It isn’t an easy thing for the newlyweds to hear either, though Len thinks they take it better than most would, used to all the differences between worlds. Still, there is wetness in Iris’s eyes as she looks at Edi and sees the pieces of the little girl that remind her of a love long lost.

“Was there anything about what you told us that was the truth?” Barry asks, allowing a touch of harshness.

“That my world’s a mess and needed help, yes. That Leonard was a way to achieve that, yes. That everyone else in my life is gone, even my mama and the woman she married in secret after my father died, yes.”

“Woman?” Barry blinks in surprise. “You said Harry Wells.”

“Harriet, I s’pose,” Tolly shrugs like it doesn’t matter either way, though the Wells in the room raises his eyebrows at that. “She preferred Harry. And giving up the ‘Allen’ for me made it harder for people to realize whose son I was since my father died for caring too much about other people. He was no one with powers like you, but he tried. I could only help give that to a few.”

Edi is showing her exhaustion now, no longer interested in the adults’ talk, and her eyes grow heavy as her head falls on Tolly’s shoulder. She yawns, and Tolly is about to say more when Rathaway comes in with Snow.

“Bartholomew Henry Wells, you lied to these kind people?”

It’s all out in the open now—at least Len assumes, though with Tolly’s skills, he could be hiding even more behind that sweet Southern drawl.

Hartley’s stump is cleaned and carefully wrapped, and he seems more alert and relaxed than Len has yet seen while scolding his friend.

Caitlin looks to Cisco and Wells in confusion. “So…no need to check for radiation poisoning?”

“It was more _Handmaid's Tale_ than _Day After Tomorrow_ ," Len says.

“Why did you lie?” Cisco accuses.

“Because,” Len speaks up for Tolly again, since he is as weary as his daughter and maybe Len is starting to understand him a bit better, “sometimes it’s the only way to survive.”

A moment passes between him and not-Barry, not-Bart, just Tolly, their eyes meeting with no one else between them, and there might be apology on either side but there is definitely shared pain, carrying too much baggage to believe in heroes.

Yet still Tolly had asked for Len, and Len had still gone. They’re both liars in their own rights.

“Let’s all settle down,” Iris says, a rare voice of reason, which proves her strength when Len thinks she might be taking all this news hardest of all, “so everyone can get some sleep.”

 

\-----

 

Promises of tomorrow are given, of more explanation needed, more care to be offered, especially to Edi, but with all the others resting in various places around STAR Labs—Hartley included with his arm tended to and Cisco promising a ‘new hand’ that has the boy looking wide-eyed over ‘sorcery’ and causes Len to flex the fingers of his own hand that had once been rebuilt—the only thing left is for Len to bring Tolly and Edi home as promised.

Barry frowned far too hard at them heading off together, but Len knows it wasn’t because of anything as childish as jealously or concern the way he once felt about Bart. It’s because Tolly’s another liar and Barry hates the negatives he sees in other versions of himself, an echo of him, when this time he thought he’d found a better one.

Len doesn’t care about ‘better’. He just wants to rest and let that little girl sleep in a real bed.

To let this boy—because he is a boy, he is—have a bed too.

Len messages Lisa and Mick very little info, just enough for them to know he’s home and will see them soon. He fully expects to give up his bedroom to the family tonight, and Tolly brings an already fast asleep Edi in without argument. But then he comes out again, rubbing his eyes, looking curiously around the apartment, with a million questions and uncertainties he’s too tired to voice, having to distrust any kindness for so much of his life.

There’s a different energy now compared to the woods and the frantic sneaking they’d done on the other earth. Neither knows what to do with it, so eventually Tolly sits on the sofa and leans back with a sigh like he could melt right into the fabric.

“Tomorrow you’ll need a shower and a change of clothes so you don’t soil my sheets and furniture.”

“You’ll survive a little mess,” Tolly says with sarcasm and a tired smile.

He’s a little shit no matter what world he’s from. “Survived a lot thanks to you.”

“Mmm.” Tolly’s eyes close. He’s unguarded, Len realizes, allowing himself to accept that he doesn’t have to keep one eye or one ear open all the time anymore. He doesn’t have to worry for his daughter more than the normal sane amount. It must be ten times more exhausting to finally release all that tension.

Len should say something, set some ground rules, figure out what the hell he’s doing.

“Tolly,” he starts, softly for Edi’s sake, but as he comes around the sofa, he realizes how even the boy’s breaths have become. He’s already asleep. Dirty clothes and skin regardless, he looks soft and…attainable in the dim light of a single lamp, sleeping on Len’s sofa.

Without the couch or bed to claim, Len grabs blankets from the closet, places one over Tolly and takes one for himself before he settles into the recliner and turns off the lamp for some semblance of sleep before the sun rises.

The rest can wait till tomorrow.


	6. Chapter 6

He wakes slowly, an unusual experience he only gets once in a very rare while. The warmth and brightness of the sun is startling, after all he is mostly nocturnal when he isn’t spending his free time in a time-space ship, sleeping through the honest working hours of the city in darkened rooms.

The second thing he perceives is an inoffensive pressure on his chest like a cat’s paws. He isn’t often touched and the sensation of gentle pats on his chest is foreign. He opens his eyes once his reason catches up with him and finds young innocent eyes beaming at him. She is bright, made brighter still by the sunlight radiating into the living room. For a moment he is reminded of the luminous being that wears his mother’s face and wonders if he’s lost his way across worlds again or if he is simply finally dead.

“Edi,” he hears a gentle warning whisper from behind the couch, “get off Leonard before you wake him.”

“He’s awake, Daddy,” she calls back with a tiny toothed smile, “Aren’t you, Mr. Snart?”

“That I am,” he croaks out, feeling aches in his back that reassure him he is alive.

Tolly swoops into view and lifts the little girl into his arms. They smell like him, is Len’s first wild thought at the sight of them looking refreshed and wearing his clothes, and something settles warm and implacable in his chest where Edi’s tiny palms had laid.

Tolly wears dark jeans that hang low on his hips and a short-sleeved shirt that Len has never worn without layers. He’s cleaned his own boots and dressed Edi in a tank top undershirt cleverly wrapped to make a dress.

“I’m sorry,” Tolly says, but his eyes which are still tired yet elated betray the joy he can’t tamp down.

“It’s fine,” Len mumbles before sniffing at the air, past the scent of the two people who had clearly taken liberties with his bath products, “are you …”

“Breakfast,” Tolly says with a bright and enormous smile, “bacon and eggs, and I wanted to make pancakes but I’ve forgotten how to make them.”

“You cooked breakfast,” Len reiterates, since he is evidently losing his mind.

“Yes, and it’s ready,” he says before turning his attention to the kid in his arms, “go on and wash up.”

Setting her down, Tolly stays crouched on Len’s level where he’s still slumped and rendered immobile by the impossible normality of it all.

“I know that I’ve been a shit to you,” Tolly whispers, “but I will never be able to thank you enough for what you’ve done.”

Len is full of questions as Tolly finally moves away to return to the kitchen. Why does he feel both warm and frozen by Tolly’s words? What does he do exactly when a man whose face he’s loved looks at him with gratitude and finality that makes him panic?

When did he admit to himself that he’d loved anyone at all and whom exactly had he loved?

There’s too much for Len to process past the singing in his kitchen and the smell of bacon and eggs emanating from it. He finally regains his voice and his faculties while Tolly is dishing out three full plates of breakfast, half singing half humming something light and vaguely religious as he goes.

“What exactly is your plan, Tolly?” Len asks after he’s taken a seat at his small table beside the little girl who returned from the bathroom with a bounce in her step.

The singing stops but the younger man still moves forward to set plates in front of Len and Edi. The girl tucks into her food, humming around her bites the song that her father had abandoned.

“Well, Barry still has some words to say to me. That’ll likely take up the whole morning,” he says with an undoubtedly mischievous smile, “and then I truly can’t say. I guess we’ll go about starting a new life in a new world, how hard could it be, right, baby girl?”

Edi giggles and nods, not understanding the enormity of their challenge, and takes another enthusiastic bite of her bacon.

Before Len can remind Tolly what a completely ridiculous idea it is to go out into an unknown world with no semblance of a plan, there is a heavy knock on the door.

It’s Mick. Len would know the sound of that knock anywhere, and although it’s just one more twist in an already twisted morning, the knowledge that Mick is there grounds him.

“Hold that half-baked thought,” Len tells Tolly as he heads for the door and opens it.

“You son of a bitch,” Mick growls, “stop running after Red’s ass everywhere you goddamn—”

“Language, Mick!” Len’s own voice orders with an edge of a whine to it.

“Brother!” a man from behind Mick exclaims with a smile on his face before throwing his arms around Len.

Only it IS Len, a copy of Len, the way Tolly is a copy of Barry. Len must remember to congratulate Barry on how well he takes the sight of himself, because it is to say the least distressing. There’s something soft about this other Len’s face when he finally releases him, something genuinely happy.

He looks like an idiot.

 “Quit it, Leo, told ya he ain’t touchy like that,” Mick grumbles as he pulls the other man away from Len almost immediately.

Mick and Leo – and oh doesn’t the name make him shudder even more than the unexpected touch – peek over his shoulder curiously. Len peeks over too and sees Tolly standing intrigued but protective, with Edi peering back from around his legs.

“This must be Barry’s long-lost brother Tolly and darling little Edith,” Leo says, over-stated as someone unaccustomed to lying would. Still if Barry and the rest took the trouble of explaining and it being only for the benefit of the girl, Len thinks it might be okay.

“Brother dear,” he says, still exaggerating as he turns to Len, “I was so excited to learn you were well and off doing the good work. And now you’re back and just in time for my big day.”

“Leo’s getting married today,” Mick says with the weariness of having heard about the subject far too much for his taste.

“Mazel,” Len says sardonically.

“Todah,” Leo answers so earnestly it almost makes Len rolls his eyes, “and you must come now that you’re here – all of you.”

“Expanding the guest list again, my love?” a voice that Len does not recognize says from the landing. A man Len has never met takes Leo’s hand and waves at the rest of them, “Good morning, I’m Ray.”

“And I’m the last to know when my backup is in town? Text your team, you jerk,” Sara says, pushing everyone on Len’s threshold into the apartment, “oh, is that the little one Barry was talking about? She’s a cutie.”

Leaning close to Len who is now bristling at the increasing intrusion, she whispers, “You sure this one isn’t psychotic, right? Blink twice if he’s crazy.”

Now Len does roll his eyes, but Sara seems satisfied by that. Suddenly, all the unwelcome company to wash away the brief comfort Len had felt having Mick there bursts fully into his home as if to take over. Raymond is there too, just to complicate things with more than one ‘Ray’, two Leonard Snarts, and a double of Barry’s in a pear tree.

Tolly relaxes quickly now that it’s clear these people are friends—loosely in some cases. There isn’t enough breakfast for everyone, but Mick is the only one interested, as the others seem to be on a different mission.

Such as Raymond carrying plastic-wrapped clothing like they just came from the dry cleaners.

“No,” Len says to no one in particular as his home is invaded, with Mick soon at the table eating whatever is left, Sara and Raymond cooing over Edi, and Ray and… _Leo_ talking to Tolly at fairly rapid pace about how he must come as well, the more the merrier, they brought clothes for all three of them, Edith included.

What world did they find Leo on anyway, Disneyland?

“I’m from Earth-1 actually,” Ray eventually says to Len. “No offence, but I’m sort of glad we never met. All I ever knew about you was what I saw on the news. Imagine my surprise meeting Leo for the first time.”

“What a disappointment that must have been for you,” Len drones.  

Ray just laughs, while Raymond is busy taking the clothing from their plastic to show a little girl a dress that might have been made for a princess in any universe, so of course Tolly can’t say no with his daughter’s eyes lighting up that a glorious lilac colored dress with petals almost like real flowers is all for her. Leo is equally smitten with the little girl. Everyone is smitten with Edi when they meet her. Even Mick takes a moment to acknowledge her existence, which is more than he usually does while eating.

“I already told Leo I’m not wearing no tie,” Mick grumbles, but Len was hoping to put the kibosh on the whole thing. He doesn’t do weddings. The West-Allen affair was a rare exception. He’s not going to his own.

“Does Mr. Snart get a pretty dress too?” Edi asks.

“If he’d prefer one,” Leo says succinctly. “How about a nice skirt to go with his suit?”

Of course they brought Len’s kilt and dressed it up like an evening look. Sara was to blame no doubt.

Edi is all smiles, in unflinching delight of it all. Tolly is mostly silent and observant, but Len can see in his liar’s eyes a rare difficulty at hiding how thrown he is by all this kind chaos.

“You folks really don’t need to go to all this trouble for us,” Tolly says with some reluctance. “And sorry if I missed it, but who’s getting married now? You, Mr. Leo?”

“ _We_ are,” Leo pulls his fiancé close to his side, and Tolly’s eyes bug out as he realizes what he didn’t grasp from the whirlwind of everyone entering earlier.

“To _each other_?” This throws him more than most things. “That…are you really? That’s amazing.”

“Oh, that drawl is fantastic,” Leo gushes—and urg, Len has never gushed at anything in his entire life and never wants to hear his voice like that again. “We really need to convince Barry to grow a beard. It is so becoming on you.”

“Thank you kindly.” Tolly keeps casting glances at Len between his gapes at Leo. “Might look a bit silly with a beard coming out of that cowl of his though.”

Leo laughs with such annoying _ease_. “Why wear a mask at all, I say.”

“Not everyone is like you, Leo,” Ray says with loving chiding.

“Thank goodness not! I might have competition.” He hugs the man closer against him. “I don’t have to worry about that with you, now, do I, Lenny?” he calls over at Len.

Did he really just—

“Not with Red around,” Mick says from the table, side-eyeing Tolly with distrust. “Or whoever this one is.”

“ _Mick_ …” Len hisses.

Tolly comes up short for the first time since Len has met him, eyes widening in dawning recognition of who ‘Red’ is and what Mick must mean. He’s smarter than Barry, this kid, much quicker on the uptake.

“You’ll come though, won’t you?” Leo says to recapture Tolly’s attention.

Raymond has Edi in his arms now and is explaining far too complicated technical details to her about how they made her dress on the Waverider, before he finally says, “like an easy-bake oven.”

She understands that even less, but runs one of her little fingers through the grey in his sideburns. Len didn’t realize how much more of it there was. Len buzzes his own regularly so that he doesn’t have to look at the startling grey evidence of time. It’s not vanity, at least he doesn’t think of it that way, he just doesn’t have time to think about his age.

“Leonard,” Sara says, catching his eye, though it isn’t her eyes he focuses on in return so much as Tolly’s next to her, since the boy passes her a glance with a swift frown that Len isn’t sure he understands, “are you going to stall all morning or get moving? We still have arrangements to help with before this party kicks off.”

“You wanna go to a party, Edith Anne?” Tolly takes his little girl from Raymond.

“Can we really, Daddy? Anyone can go to the party?”

“These folks don’t turn people away for being different.”

“We like different,” Ray says, and reaches over to tap Edi’s nose, the tip of his finger glowing for a moment like the end of a magic wand.

 _Meta_. Interesting.

Edi giggles, and Tolly is soon gone with his daughter and the offered clothes like he needs a moment to breathe, taking the bedroom so Len can have the bathroom to shower.

Len should be saying no, loudly and repeatedly, but he’s exhausted, curious about what some of Tolly’s expression he couldn’t decipher might mean, and even if half of him wants to shoot each and every interloper in his home right now, the one wearing his face especially, he wants to delay the finality of what Tolly was trying to say to him earlier even more.

He doesn’t get why.

He _gets_ why. But he doesn’t understand why he would ever be foolish enough to try again when he knows better.

Then again, he never was good at learning lessons.

“Gimme that,” Len snatches the ensemble with his kilt from Leo, making sure they all see his annoyance. “Can’t get married on your own world, _brother_?”

A look passes between Leo and Ray, but Mick is the one who answers with a single word around his chewing.

“Nazis.”

Oh. Huh.

“Don’t worry, fried some for ya.” Mick goes back for another bite.

That’ll be a fun explanation.

“Make yourselves useful then if you’re such helpful rays of sunshine,” Len says to the soon to be newlyweds, “and clean up my kitchen.”

Ray smirks, but Leo busts out laughing—open and carefree.

“Something funny?” Len asks.

“You made the most flawless pun just now,” Leo says. “Clearly, we’re not so different.”

Clearly.

At least there will be booze at a wedding.

 

\-----

 

Len doubts he’ll actually have anything to drink when the reception rolls around considering Tolly and Edi stick close to his side from the moment they leave the apartment. Len thought Tolly would use the opportunity to get away, strike up more conversations with the others, but again, he’s not a talker like his doubles. He listens and watches and waits, like a good boy on the run always should. He’s quiet and not trusting, but he trusts Len, so it’s Len he stays near.

Plus Edi likes the kilt and keeps playing with Len’s pleats.

“Fan of the look, Edith Anne?”

“It’s a real pretty skirt, Mr. Snart.”

“That’s why I got it.”

“Why you wearing pants underneath?”

“Wouldn’t want to make any of the fine ladies in dresses here today jealous of my legs.”

Edi doesn’t get the joke, but Tolly chuckles.

Kid cleans up nice, not that Len is surprised. He’s seen Barry in a suit, and a tux, and head-to-toe leather. He knows what that body looks like, knows what it feels like under his palms. Sometimes he’d pay money to forget it.

Barry’s color is red and Bart’s was blue to match his beloved. Tolly is dressed in cool greys, which seem too muted and yet entirely fitting. The country boy with his daughter in a suit and tie while she’s in her Sunday best for the first time in her life. They look so quiet and unassuming, like they would fit perfectly into civilian life far away from all this mess. Wasn’t that what Tolly was after, what he’d been trying to say?

They’re waiting on the ceremony to start, everyone running around to make sure it’s all perfect, and while Len would rather not help anyone, everyone who passes tells them to sit tight, they don’t need to lend a hand, they have a child to watch, like Len is lumped in with Tolly and Edi.

Meddlesome, every last one of them. Len doubts Barry would be so carefree if he was here, still owing Tolly a talking to and ever so righteous about being lied to.

Is he going to show up, Len wonders? All of STAR Labs too? Maybe not all, since they still have houseguests with Tolly’s Hartley, Shawna, and the others all being tended to.

“So,” Tolly says after a stretch of quiet. “Got a thing for Barry, do you?”

Goddamn Mick.

“Not an issue considering his _wife_ ,” Len says, looking forward at the archway that’s been built at the front covered in flowers. They’re in some large warehouse outside of town that Barry apparently owns. Makes for a nice venue with a lot of space and enough exits to keep him calm.

Len shifts, wishing the din of the chaos around them would drown him right out, but he owes Tolly a real answer.

“Nothing ever happened with him,” Len says, he doesn’t have to mention that something happened with someone else.

Tolly hums as if accepting that, before he nods towards the groom that doesn’t look like Len, “Do you think there is someone like him for you somewhere in this world?”

“He is the him from this world.”

“Oh. Another world then?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”  

“Miss Lance seems nice,” Tolly carries on, clearly pressing for more.

“She is. A good _friend_. I don’t have many of those.”

“Neither do I,” Tolly answers, his voice sobering.

“Rathaway will be fine,” Len finds himself reassuring him, “he’s in good hands.”

“I know,” Tolly sighs, taking a sip of a drink Len hadn’t noticed he had, “He’s strong.”

“Baez will recover too. I’m sure Team Flash will find places to put those others.”

Len doesn’t do small talk. It’s close enough to torture, but maybe the real problem is the looming feeling of so much more than anything small, especially considering where they are. He’d rather keep the conversation within the inane than field any more questions about his entanglements.

Edi climbs onto Len’s lap instead of Tolly’s, and Len can’t say he minds. He forgets what it was like when Lisa was this small.

“Daddy,” she says with her little legs swinging and her hands busy picking at Len’s kilt again, “Mr. Leo said to ask if I can be a flower girl – I told ‘im I didn’t know what that is so he said I’d spread flower petals on the pretty carpet when the music’s playin’ and then come right back here. May I, Daddy, please?”

Tolly looks around the venue as if to survey the area before he turns back to the girl with that liar’s smile, “Of course, petal. Can’t be anyone more fit for it than you, can there? Just make sure you do as Mr. Leo says and come right back here when you’re done, alright?”

Permission granted, Edi climbs off Len’s lap with the same casual determination she’d used to climb on.

“Am I really about to watch two men get married?” Tolly asks with a small sense of awe.

“Not what I expected out of my day either,” Len remarks before he catches sight of Barry and Iris taking their places. “Heads up, the high and mighty are here.”

“It’s no use pretending you aren’t fond of him,” Tolly murmurs as a hush falls over the gathered.

Edi takes to her role with so much ease, anyone would believe she’d been rehearsing the dainty way in which she drops bright yellow petals to each side of her as she keeps pace with the music. Once she’s finished, just as promised, she comes right back to them and clambers up on Len’s lap to settle quietly and watch the proceedings.

Tolly brushes a thumb over her cheek with a soft little smile and turns his attention to those standing at the front. He watches silently, rapt in fascination that is easier for Len to watch than the sight of some happy-go-lucky look-alike getting married to a total stranger.

When Stein moves on to the blessing, Tolly leans forward slightly, forehead creased in confusion. Before Len knows it, Tolly has leaned into his space just as Edi had burrowed her way there, whispering a question into his ear.

“It’s Hebrew,” Len whispers back, which doesn’t seem to quench Tolly’s curiosity but seems enough to let him drop it for the moment.

Whatever the grooms step on is larger than a single flute of champagne, a crystal bowl maybe, but the resounding crash and the cheers that follow are as expected to Len as they are surprising to Edi who jumps in his lap and lets out a startled little cry.

“It’s alright,” Len says, not needing to whisper as everyone around them claps and hoots, “they do that so any evil thing that might be lurking about, jealous of their happiness, will run off scared.”

Edi nods accepting the explanation and joining right along in the clapping with everyone else.

Len knows that Tolly is looking at him, he feels the heat of it on his skin like a brand. When he finally returns Tolly’s stare, he finds something dangerously magnetic there and it’s almost more than he can stand in this place, in this moment. Len can’t help the feeling that in the scheme of things, in the face of Tolly and Edi’s newfound joy and freedom, he might just be the evil lurking thing, envious and hungry to be part of it.

 

\-----

 

The reception is in the same building, the tables for food and a little space for dancing already setup in the back of the warehouse, so from ceremony to party, there’s merely a change of seats. Len’s at a table with Tolly and Edi, but also with Mick and several Legends, which includes their world’s Hartley now, after Mick dragged him along.

It isn’t difficult to tell that Mick’s crush on Doctor Snow has been sidestepped by the younger man’s presence, because although Hartley table-hops initially, ever the social butterfly, especially at a gay Jewish wedding, “Like I’d miss this, are you kidding?” he hangs all over Mick while sitting beside him, and Mick doesn’t even flinch so much as grumble on occasion.

They’ve definitely slept together.

“Are you Unca Hart’s brother?” Edi asks him.

It’s an easy enough explanation, though she seems to understand the difference in worlds.

“Clearly, the better looking brother,” Hartley says. “Don’t you worry about your Uncle, sweetheart, I’m gonna make him all brand new and replace that poor hand tomorrow.”

“Unca Hart’s hand got hurt?” Edi’s eyes widen.

Tolly stares at Hartley with tight lips. He doesn’t seem too fond of the less reserved version of his friend.

“Next time you see him, you won’t even be able to tell.”

Once Edi is distracted by the dancing starting up, Hartley explains that Gideon has full genetic makeup from him, so rebuilding a hand for his double is no big deal, “Just like she did for you, I hear.”

“You had a hand rebuilt?” Tolly turns to gape at Len.

“If your left hand should cause you to sin and all that,” Len shrugs, and Tolly chuckles at the blasphemy.

“And here I thought sorcery ended at those with powers.”

“Just you wait, country boy,” Hartley winks, “we’re gonna rock your socks off.”

“Don’t you go rockin’ nothin’,” Mick growls, and Hart takes his gruff warning like an endearment, draping himself over the larger man all the more, like he chooses to take any threat as innuendo, which is probably how they ended up in bed.

The dancing isn’t for everyone. No matter how much Hartley whines, he isn’t going to get Mick out there, but as soon as Edi is away from their table, her feet never touch the floor.

She’s passed around by strangers without any sign of unease, held up by Jax, who stretches out her arm like they’re doing a proper waltz, or on Cisco’s feet to help her move to the right steps. Everyone is in love with her, and Tolly is content to watch and let them shower her with attention so he can sit in peace.

“Only wedding I ever witnessed was Iris and Eddie’s,” he says quietly, only loud enough for Len beside him to hear.

“Can’t imagine that was as much of a spectacle.”

“Little gathering in the woods. Didn’t even have a white dress for her. I imagine _theirs_ was more like this?” he nods at Barry and Iris on the dance floor.

“Aside from the Jewish traditions.”

Tolly glances at Len with all his curiosity from before. “I don’t really know much about that. Little things, I guess. No pork?”

“I’m hardly observant. That bacon this morning wasn’t turkey.”

Tolly chuckles. “A little faith is nice sometimes. Easier when it amounts to something though.”

“Rare as that may be,” Len agrees. “Tell me, you on the run only because of your friends and your daughter, or do you have your own secrets to keep?”

“I’m no…meta, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not.”

Tolly’s masks are as good as any of Len’s, but they crack all the same. He gets what Len’s asking and doesn’t blush about it. “Women are fine by me. So are men. But that’s corruption back home…not that I’ve had much chance with either. Nothing longer than a stolen moment here or there. You?”

“Same story, as far as partner choices and lacking conquests goes.” Aside from Bart. That was months of madness, the longest relationship Len ever had, if he can even call it that. But he doesn’t want to think about Bart tonight.

“I keep turning over in my head what to do next,” Tolly says. “Having options is…strange.”

Options that’ll likely take Tolly and Edi far from Central City. “Even if Rathaway gets his new hand, and Miss Baez turns out fine, you can still take time to rest. On the plus side, looks like Ramon finally figured out how to get speedsters drunk,” he brought Tolly’s attention back to Barry and Iris, “so at least you can avoid Barry’s speech for another night.”

Barry’s still dancing with his wife, who’s giggling now, but every so often their spins become blurs with a kick of lightning. They look as ridiculously happy as the even newer newlyweds.

“You act like none of this fazes you,” Tolly says, “and maybe you’re not Commander Cold and you’re nothing like Mr. Leo there, but you’re the same good sort like the stories I used to hear.”

Tolly pauses and Len doesn’t know what to say to any of that but then, he speaks up again, “I don’t need to be anyone’s burden, Leonard.”

Len glances over sharply, wondering where the gentle smile went so suddenly, but maybe it has to do with Barry and Iris, and Leo and Ray—mismatched from them and yet so blissful.

“After all this, soon as we can move on, you'll never have to spare a thought for us again.” Tolly’s eyes are on nothing, not any couples, not on Len. “But if you do think of me, I hope it’s with some sweetness despite the trouble I caused.”

 _Goodbye_. He’s saying goodbye and they haven’t even lifted the grooms on chairs for the Hora yet.

“Tolly…”

“Daddy!” Edi’s voice erupts as she comes running over to the table leading Detective West by the hand like she’s found a treasure. “I got Paw Paw, see? It’s Mama and Aunt Iris’s daddy!”

The liar’s smile falters again— _hard_. Tolly remembers a West from his world, maybe from long ago when he was a boy, but he clearly remembers, and it stings. Wally is easier for him because no Wally existed on his world, but Joe…

“Joe…” he breathes the name, standing like he wishes he could hug the man but doesn’t truly know him enough to be sure he can.

West takes care of that by hugging Tolly like he would any version of Barry, like he’d even been close to doing with Bart, accepting him easily after the mad boy saved his son. Len hears the way the air rushes out of Tolly at the embrace, and he’s happy and sorry for him at the same time.

Edi clings happily to West’s pant leg, but she doesn’t hear the whisper Len does.

“I can’t believe that’s my grandbaby,” West says with a hitch in his voice, then clears his throat and pulls back to look at Tolly properly, “I mean I know she isn’t but…”

“She doesn’t have grandparents left,” Tolly says with warmth and honesty in his eyes and humanness that Bart lacked and Barry sometimes does too. “You can certainly be one if you want the job.”

It’s chatter and strange not-quite closeness that follows, but eventually Edi is demanding that she dance with her Paw Paw, and West and Tolly can only laugh and agree. Tolly falls back into his chair like he’s seen a ghost. He has, after all, he’s seen many.

Len knows the feeling.

“Stay,” he says before the magic can fade from Tolly’s eyes. He looks at him with a start, unsure if the offer is more than pity. “Just enough to get your feet back under you. I have the space. And you have family here. You don’t have to run anymore.”

Always running, this kid, in any universe. He deserves to rest somewhere, some world.

“Alright,” Tolly says, as if some of his burden has finally lifted.

They don’t get much time alone before Edi is back.

“You have to come now too, Daddy.”

“Do I, petal?” Tolly says with more joy than he’s shown since the first lies he gave Len when they met in STAR Labs, but this time it’s real. He looks at Len after he takes his daughter’s hand. “Don’t suppose we can tempt you, Leonard?”

If only he knew.

“I don’t boogie, thanks, but I might be persuaded to sway with a certain someone on my feet.” Len lurches up, and is sure a good half of those in attendance will gape when he hits the floor, but he means it that he won’t do more than sway for Edi’s sake. Then he smirks at Tolly. He really can’t help it. “Hope you’re not too heavy.”

Tolly laughs.

Len’s just relieved he convinced him to stay, even if it’s just another dream, fleeting and soon to be gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Len wakes up to the sounds of clattering and mumbling and …giggling in his kitchen. Once Tolly had accepted his _offer-request-plea_ to stay, Len chose a more appropriate safe house, with two bedrooms and better access to public transportation. It was a terribly mundane place for when he needed to pass off as a tax-paying law-abiding citizen for some time. It was a nice building with a doorman who tipped his hat and called him Mr. Wynters and knew not to accept packages for him.

He’d watched Tolly root shamelessly through Len’s drawers for something to change into and listened as he tucked Edi into bed with a lullaby that hypnotized him like a siren song. He’d made himself scarce and locked his bedroom door he told himself, just to be alone – just to be able to think- before he could find himself alone with Tolly in the darkened apartment.

Now he can hear them both awake and chattering outside his door and he can’t think of a way to run out the window that doesn’t contradict his absolutely demented assurances that they were welcome in his space. Once he finally makes it out the door there isn’t, it seems, any time for awkwardness to dance around at all, there was only breakfast to be eaten and questions to be answered.

Edi shovels a forkful of eggs into her mouth and asks around them, “When can we go to the zoo, daddy?”

“Soon, baby girl. As soon as Uncle Hart’s on the up and up,” Tolly says, adding absentmindedly, “don’t speak with your mouth full.”

She swallows in a dangerous looking gulp and continues, “Is his hand gonna be okay, daddy?”

“I think so, petal,” he says, as he cracks more eggs into a bowl, “did you mind him in your prayers?”

“I did,” she nods vigorously, “and I prayed for Miss Baez and all them sick folks, and I prayed for Uncle Barry and Auntie Iris and Paw Paw and all our new friends but I didn’t remember all their names so I asked baby Jesus to take care of all the nice folk we met,” she says pausing for a big dramatic breath before continuing, “and I prayed the angels keep mama and papa and I prayed for you, daddy, and for Mr. Snart, of course. It was the longest prayers ever, daddy.”

“Well ain’t you a lucky lady to have so many kind people to keep in your thoughts,” Tolly says as he shuffles more scrambled eggs onto her plate, “now eat up. We need go and check on your uncle and ‘em.”

“Morning,” Len says just to make himself noticed. Tolly nods and smiles and sets a plate in front of him, laying a hand on his shoulder that Len can’t stop looking at and yet doesn’t feel the need to shake off.

“Rest well? I was wonderin’ if you could drop us off at the labs or just point us in the right direction.”

“Ready for a talking to, then?”

“If Allen will insist,” Tolly says, not looking too put upon, “he’s got every right. Everyone he and his team are looking after are my responsibility and I’ve been off dancing at weddings and having a time of it.”

It’s simple when he says it like that, uncomplicated. A man taking responsibility for his own and nothing else, not trying to put the weight of the world on his shoulders or the burden of destiny.

Edi questions every aspect of her previous day. Len can’t remember speaking so much in ages, answering her questions about Jewish customs as best he can in one breath and coming up for an excuse for Sara’s less than private hook up with a member of the wait staff the next. Tolly seems more than happy to sit in silence and let Len handle his daughter’s curiosity all by himself.

As soon as they stroll into STAR labs, past their dismal security Len might add, they see Hart sitting beside Dr. Snow. His buzzed hair and perfect looking hand greeting them with a smile and …sign language.

“Sight for sore eyes,” he says softly, hands moving along over his face and chest.

“It’s a real miracle,” Tolly says with audible awe as he answers in kind with hand gestures that Len only vaguely understands. He takes Hartley’s hand in his and runs his own fingertips over the back of it in a familiar gesture that neither man questions.

“It is,” Rathaway agrees, “but it is nothing compared to what I’ve learned on that magnificent contraption. Tolly, the computers, you know ‘em-“

“Yeah, they’ve got lots here,” Tolly notes, pulling away with a final gentle squeeze of the new hand, “fancier than the Fountain’s by far.”

“No, Tolly. They’ve got music in ‘em. Not just music. They have all music – from anywhere in the whole wide world and as old or as new as has ever been made.”

Tolly frowns for the first time since seeing his friend healed and turns to Snow who is looking at them with soft tenderness.

“Is he on any sort of medication, Dr. Snow?”

The woman laughs out in a surprised and slightly heartbroken little way, “No, Tolly, I’ve never heard it described quite that way but your friend is right. Most of the music ever made is easily available to anyone, you’re free to listen to however much of it you can take.”

“Impossible,” he whispers turning back to Hart, “it-“

“I can’t even begin to explain, there is so much of it so strange and beautiful,” he laughs with his hands moving along to what Len guesses are the corresponding words, his voice is as wet as the corners of his eyes. Of all the things in the world that he thought might shock and move Tolly and his tribe, he never imagined that Spotify might knock them cold.

Len feels a tug at his pants and looks down to Edi who motions very seriously for him to lean down to her level. He doesn’t even pause to think before he complies.

“Mr. Snart, do you like music?”

“Miss Edith, call me Len.”

“Okay, Mr. Len, do you like music? Daddy loves music and I like music too!”

“Yeah, I guess I like music well enough,” he tells her and can’t help the smile that he gives her in return when she grins wide and claps her hands, bouncing in a concentric circle of pure joy.

“Tolly,” a voice breaks through the excited chatter, “we need to talk.”

Len looks up to see Barry looking…well obviously trying for his best imitation of West and failing miserably at it. He was trying to dad-stare an actual father and it wasn’t working, but it did look oddly endearing.

“Yes,” Tolly said without a hint of concern, “of course.”

“I think what Barry is trying to say in such a menacing way is that everyone you brought along has recovered well and they’re anxious to know what’s next,” Iris says before turning to her husband, “wipe that look off your face, you look like dad.”

Len smirks at her and inclines his head slightly in gratitude for preventing a scene. It seems she’s the only one who can keep her head on straight around multiple versions of her husband.

“Well, I confess I thought Hart and I would take these folks, Miss Baez too if she’d be willing, and get as far out of your ways as we could,” Tolly says with hesitation, “but… see, your father said he might want to have a place in Edi’s life and I won’t stand in the way of that. Leonard’s been kind enough to open up his home to us for the time being.”

“We’d be more than happy to have you stay with us, Tolly,” Iris says, smiling at the man but stealing furtive glances at the girl standing by Len.

“We would? We would, of course -,” Barry says after a look from his wife, “and we wanted to let you know we’re looking into accommodating everyone else as well.”

“Tolly and Edi already have a place with me,” Len interjects, “like he said.”

Before anyone can react to his declaration, Hart breaks in with his own news.

“Oh, Piper – that is, what my recently reunited kin’s asked me to call him,” he mentions, “he said I could stay in his home and make use of it freely while he is away.”

“What about Miss Baez?” Tolly points out.

“She can certainly stay with me,” Hart says, “I got the impression it was quite the sizeable living though I haven’t seen it yet.”

“I want to leave this place,” Shawna says as she comes into the room, “I am grateful to be here, to be sure. But I would much prefer to be somewhere out of the city – out of any city. I would much prefer to be in the country again.”

Barry nods, crossing his arms and taking a deep breath before lighting up with an idea.

“You know, when I last checked in with Frankie, she mentioned that she had talked to her foster parents about wanting to help other metas start fresh like she did,” Barry says, “– not everyone that came over is a meta but maybe Keystone is a good place for them. There are more suburbs out of the city and Frankie could help them ease in, start fresh.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Iris agrees.

Shawna nods and steps over to Tolly, reaching up to touch his face and rising on her toes to kiss his forehead.

“Thank you, Tol,” she says quietly.

Tolly shakes his head and lays his hand over hers. The comfortable touches seem easily traded between him and the people he trusts.

“You’ve nothing to thank me for,” he whispers back.

Shawna nods and walks over to Len, clasping her hands in front of her. “You saved my life,” she says simply, “you are a good man.”

Len doesn’t know what the response to that is. He did. It’s not something he’s going to deny, but it’s not something he expects gratitude for.

“Just a man,” he finally answers, at a loss for anything to add.

“You look after that boy and his girl. They need lookin’ after,” she says solemnly, before turning on her heel and taking Hart’s hands in hers. The other man follows her silently out of the room to the adjacent, presumably where the rest of the rescued are.

 “I don’t think it’s a good idea, you rooming with Snart,” Barry turns to Tolly with a frown as soon as the others exit.

“Barry,” Iris hisses at him.

Len continues to stand quietly by, choosing to study the perfection of Tolly’s stony poker face as he turns to Barry.

“And why ever not?”

“Okay,” Iris says, loudly clapping her hands, “I think we first need to worry about finding somewhere in Keystone for all of these people to have a comfortable home close to each other. It’ll make for an easier transition. Hart can take… our Hartley’s place, and Snart can host Tolly and Edi as long as that arrangement works for them. Let’s not make problems out of our solutions, okay?”

Barry looks mutinous but nods once before walking out of the room.

“He truly does despise a liar, does he not?” Tolly mutters under his breath.

Iris laughs out softly at that and moves forward to give him a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder. Len closes his eyes at the sight.

“Barry’s just sensitive about people that look like him doing anything that he wouldn’t,” she tells him, “or thinks he wouldn’t anyway. But he really does want what’s best for you. If you ever want to come to our place or my dad’s…our doors are open.”

“I think we’ll be alright with Leonard,” Tolly says smoothly, “won’t we, baby girl?”

Edi clutches at Len’s leg as if to count him present in the room, “Yes, Auntie Iris!”

Len watches the emotions play clearly on Iris’s face, such a sharp contrast to the absolute control Tolly has mastered. The very sight of Edi seems to tear Iris apart from joy to grief in rapid cycles. Her smile is honest and sad and Len can’t quite account for the instinct to pick Edi up and turn her away from it.

“I’ll let you get back home then,” she says, “but here – take this with you so you can call us any time.”

She hands Tolly a cellphone, which Tolly looks at perplexedly, “Call you? This is a telephone?”

Iris smiles again and turns to Len, “You’ll help him out with it, yeah?”

Len nods, finding it comfortable and easy to take direction from her despite himself. He likes Iris West-Allen, admires her, regardless of his feelings for and about her husband and the men who look like him.

“Oh, and there’s this,” Iris adds, turning over to a desk and pulling out a thick folder, “forms of ID and all that. And there’s you know some stuff about the city, places for Edi to go to school when you’re both ready.”

“We can’t thank you enough,” Tolly says, barely managing to hide the awe in his voice. Sometimes he slips, Len notes, if you pay enough attention.

“Just -,” she takes a breath and smiles at him, “just be happy, Tolly.”

She takes her leave then and Len taps Edi’s back gently, where she’s been quietly leaning against his leg.

“Let’s go home, Miss Edith Anne,” he says, eyes on Tolly’s immoveable face, “I think your dad’s had enough excitement for one morning.”

-

The promise of relaxation doesn’t hold when they arrive back at the apartment to find Lisa with her feet up on the coffee table scrolling through Netflix that Len hasn’t used since it was installed.

“You’re back! Wonderful,” she says, standing and striding over, “you must be Barry Allen number three.”

“Lise,” he hisses at her to no avail.

“Bartholomew Wells’, ma’am – Tolly if you don’t mind.”

“Adorable,” she quips before falling to a squat beside Edi, “and who might this gorgeous lady be?”

“My name’s Edith Anne Thawne, ma’am.”

“You’re precious,” Lisa practically coos, “I’m Lisa – Lenny’s sister.”

“You weren’t at Mr. Leo and Mr. Ray’s weddin’,” Edi says, a tiny hint of suspicion in her voice.

“Can’t tell my brothers apart, can you believe it? Makes things a little awkward – but I heard it was a blast.”

“It was!” Edi agrees, ready to trust and believe like only a child can.

“What do you want, Lise?” Len sighs.

“A minute with my brother, is that too much to ask? Besides, a little bird who lives in Mick’s bunk now called and said the newcomers needed new threads and were due for a shopping trip. You know how much I love shopping, Lenny.”

“About as much as I hate it,” Len notes.

“What do you say, Tolly,” Lisa says with a grin, “you two could do with a wardrobe, right? Some toys?”

The way Lisa looks straight at Tolly when she says toys isn’t lost on Len even if he’s the only one to catch the double entendre.

Tolly picks up Edi and kisses her cheek, finally revealing some of the exhaustion that Len expected – even after a full night of sleep. But still, he looks at Lisa with a solid grin and says, “That would be lovely, ma’am – though I’m afraid I haven’t got any money just yet.”

“Don’t be silly, it’s my treat,” Lisa says, linking arms with Len.

“No, not me,” Len says, slipping his arm right out.

“But Lenny-“

“Leonard’s done so much to help us settle in already,” Tolly breaks in, “I think he could do with a minute to himself.”

Lisa huffs but smacks Len’s arm before giving him a hug and grabbing a purse he hadn’t even noticed.

“Don’t wait up, then,” she says as she gently prods the other two out the door, “and don’t mope around all day – Mick’s expecting you at number eight!”

Len takes his sweet time and doesn’t get to safe house number eight until he’s had some time to research possible new marks for a few hours. It’s the best way he can think of to release all the unthinkable tension, planning new ways to continue his life as it had been.

He doesn’t knock so he isn’t surprised to find Hartley Rathaway – the Earth 1 full head of hair pain in the ass Rathaway – sitting on Mick’s lap like a low-end stripper.

“I see you’re entertained,” he drawls out, startling the boy but by no means catching Mick off guard.

“Took ya long enough, fucker,” Mick says, tapping Hartley’s side with a gentleness that startles Len until the boy climbs off him and starts flipping through a nearby tech magazine.

“What did you want to talk about?”

“What do you think?” Mick says as he heads over to the fridge and grabs three beers, popping one open for Rathaway and handing it to him before handing an unopened one to Len.

“I think you’ve gone softer than I thought running around with the Legends. Worried about me, partner?”

“Goddam know I’m worried,” Mick growls in his face, “you gonna run after every version of that kid’s face till you get killed again?”

“Last time I got killed, as you say, it wasn’t running after anyone but you, Mick.”

“And that was stupid then,” Mick hurls back, not bothering to butcher his own words. He must truly trust the Rathaway kid if he’s not keeping up the stupid schtick around him. Len knew that sometimes Mick’s brain jumbled a word here and there – he also knew Mick had been playing that up since he was twenty.

“It’s done, I’m back – what more is there to say.”

“Last time –” Mick starts.

“Last time was different, last time …won’t happen again.”

“You’re gonna die old, Snart,” Mick threatens, “or so help me I’ll kill you myself.”

“Noted,” Len says, inclining his head, “I’m touched.”

“Not by Mick,” Hartley calls out without glancing up from the magazine, “I don’t share.”

“So’s new Red a good lay?” Mick asks, making his way back to the couch with Rathaway.

“I couldn’t say.”

“Crossin’ fucking worlds and you ain’t even get laid,” Mick grumbles before taking a swig of his beer, “and you’re saying I’m gone soft.”

“Not a soft thing about you,” Hartley croons in a sickeningly sweet way.

Len gags and pops his beer open on the edge of a desk, “Does he have an off button?”

“Haven’t found it yet,” Mick says.

“Not for lack of searching,” Hartley adds, “so are the dopplegangers all taking my place? I told other me it was okay.”

“He’s taking you up on your offer,” Len says, taking a drink, “most the others are relocating to the countryside.”

“What about new Red and the girl,” Mick asks, setting his beer down.

Len keeps his silence long enough for Mick to break out into a long string of curses.

“It’s gonna bite you in the ass, Snart,” he says, finally sitting back and placing a hand almost carelessly on the back of Hartley’s neck, “mark my fucking words.”

-

He walks into a chaos of joy, puffs of color and music blasting and Lisa smiling in a proud sort of way.

Edi is outfitted like the child of an heir, in a pant and sweater set with matching ties in her hair. She’s swinging around with a pair of dresses in her hands while Tolly sits, looking young as he is, swaying with closed eyes in front of Len’s speakers. He doesn’t recognize the music, likely one of the pop things Lisa’s into these days, it hardly matters in light of the bliss on Tolly’s face.

“Good day?”

“It’s like they were starving,” Lisa whispers, “remember the mac n’ cheese days? When we hadn’t gotten half a meal in three days and you busted enough boxes off the top shelf to feed an army? It was like one of those days. Only they’d been starving for colors and…”

“Life,” Len agrees, “they were both born hungry for it.”


	8. Chapter 8

Len gets a pullout to replace the couch until they can find the time to change the second bedroom that’s currently an office into a bedroom for Tolly and Edi. For the time being, Tolly insists on them taking the pullout since they’re up earlier usually and Len deserves his privacy, something they were never used to anyway.

Half of Len’s closet is made up of clothes that aren’t his, including Edi’s dresses, and it’s a strange warm feeling that spirals up his chest every time he opens the door to a mix of patterns and sizes like a complete but strange picture.

So much happens in the days that follow while feeling like he’s in purgatory, waiting for an axe to drop that over and over again never falls. It’s utilitarian, it has to be, after the whirlwind of Lisa and shopping and colors and music. They need to get Edi into preschool and Tolly a job, stability for them in this new life they’re building beyond just walls around them.

Between Len working side angles for future jobs, he finds himself tagging along to visit preschools with Tolly, because the displaced doppelganger doesn’t know the streets that well yet, and Len could walk just about any block in this city with his eyes closed.

Tolly chooses the second preschool they visit. It’s closer to Len’s apartment, more kids, more art projects, and filled with smiling faces from the staff that Tolly and Len both read with equal scrutiny but deem trustworthy.

They visit Tolly’s Hartley at Piper’s place after he’s settled, his new hand working wonders for him and the patchiness of his hair already smoothed and starting to grow in more presentably. He’s taken some of Piper’s old clothes too, but he wears them more minimally, ever sweet and patient and kind—and everything Piper isn’t.

Edi gets lost in the largeness of the place, running circles, loving the view of the city from the large windows and just how much there is to take in, but when Len asks Tolly if he’d prefer to stay somewhere like this, Tolly shakes his head.

“I never needed luxury, Leonard. Your place is fine for us.”

“I have other places. If you—”

“Stop fussing, we’re fine where we are.” Tolly’s fingers curl gently around his wrist for the briefest of moments, the same way he touches Hartley or Edi with ease, but it catches Len’s breath short for no reason at all other than…most people wouldn’t dare.

Barry never would.

Maybe Len was worried Tolly would see an exit for himself with Hartley that he didn’t know he wanted until it was in front of him, but his eyes don’t betray any of that liar’s mask. After all, he wouldn’t lie to hide something he doesn’t want, only if it helped get what he does.

What he wants seems to be simplicity and peace, and Len has had so very little of that lately. Or ever. Maybe he wants that too.

Hartley talks about the job he already got thanks to Piper grilling him for details of anything he might want to do and then acting on that like only Piper can—no pause to think or dally.

“It’s a record shop, Tol, only it has so much more than that. Music playing always, and instruments on the walls, and oh the people, how they love to come and listen even when they don’t buy, and no one minds it. I could stay there all day and night.”

Len should head out, he isn’t needed here, an interloper between friends. Tolly has his own key, Len only went along to make sure he knew the way since he isn’t used to pulling up Maps on his cell phone yet, which might as well be alien tech in his mind.

There are places Len should be, people to side-eye, heists to plan. Altruistic heists maybe, like he’s been doing for some time, getting the hauls to the people who deserve them. All the same though, he isn’t sure he belongs here. 

But Tolly’s eyes at the thought of being somewhere music _lives_ is too much for Len to walk away from, and soon they’re headed down the street all four of them toward Hartley’s new place of work.

It’s nothing special to Len, there’s a million places like this, where the hipsters call home close to a coffee shop and bookstore even like the perfect microcosm for modern 20-something life, decorated in instruments for sale, old records, new CDs, and the latest beat headphones or music players like iPods, even though everyone uses their phones for that now. Plenty of people like options and vintage and irony to keep this place running, and they still have a HELP WANTED sign for more clerks.

Hartley was hoping for this, to have Tolly close, his one friend, since Shawna and others are farther away. Len can imagine the pair working here together, settling in well to take it slow making new friends with each other as stable crutches.

Again, Len thinks, he should slip away, he isn’t needed anymore, why didn’t Tolly just ask to move in with Hartley given all his space, but Tolly includes Len in his wonder as he walks the rows. One hand drags across vinyl, the other holds onto his daughter, and his eyes turn to Len like this world is far more brilliant and wonderful than anyone gives it credit for.

There’s gratitude in Tolly’s eyes, because even though Hartley brought them to the store, Len brought them _here_. Len brought them home.

It’s a terrible, wonderful thing to have someone look at you like you gave them the world.

Tolly has a job before they leave, and a little more permanence settles between them. Len decides he definitely likes Hartley more than Piper.

\----

Most days run in the same manner. Tolly wakes up before dawn, Len just along with it. Tolly prepares breakfast with the awe of someone who once had plenty and then for a very long time had nothing, rediscovering the joy of life after rations. Len watches him. Edi wakes when the mood strikes her but never later than eight, she eats with delight and sings with delight and does all things delightfully. Tolly watches her. Len watches him.

Then Tolly ducks back into his room to get ready for work and Len and Edi look at each other with the mutual curiosity of animals of a different species who are unable to determine which of them is the predator and which of them is the prey. Sometimes, Dora the Explorer plays in the background. By the time Diego comes around, Tolly is ready for work and ready to take Edi to her daycare.

Tolly adjusts his daughter’s tiny backpack and nudges her shoulder, “What do we say Miss Edith?”

“Have a lovely and blessed day, Mr. Snart,” the little girl replies, obviously by rote.

“Now Miss Edith,” Len says, leaning against the kitchen counter, “I thought we had an agreement.”

“Oh yes!” she says, jumping up as if suddenly excited by the prospect of something new, “Have a lovely and blessed day, Mr. Len!”

Len can’t help his smile or the honesty in his chuckle, “Right back at you, kid.”

“Have lovely day, Leonard,” Tolly says with a slight nod.

Len raises an eyebrow at him, “No blessings from you?”

“I’m not fit to give them,” he answers with half a smile, “we’ll see you tonight.”

Most days run in the same manner until one day, they do not. That morning Tolly rises before dawn and Len along with it, but when Tolly starts to prepare breakfast he looks preoccupied. He bites at his bottom lip in a way that some would accuse of being flirtatious but in Tolly it exists in innocence and - “Did you know that Memorial Day is a national holiday?”

“For several decades, yes,” Len says as he pours his coffee.

“I… wasn’t really aware of it,” Tolly says, looking only a little embarrassed.

“Of course.”

“Edi’s daycare is closed but…the shop isn’t.”

“Capitalism is unforgiving.”

“Right,” Tolly finally breaks, and Len braces himself for the request – “Do you think Mrs. Allen would look after her?”

“Mrs. West-Allen is a busy woman,” Len answers once he recovers from the unexpected twist of childish jealousy in his gut, “I can look after Edi myself.”

Tolly seems completely thrown by the offer and spins on his heel, spatula in hand.

“I… you?”

“I’m perfectly capable,” Len says, because he is. He did as good of a job as he could have with Lisa all things considered, and he doubts that he’ll embark Edi on a life of crime after a few hours of babysitting.

Tolly’s gaze falls to his feet. It’s what he does, Len knows, not when he’s embarrassed but when he’s uncertain of how well he can hide his thoughts.

“We impose on you so much already, Leonard.”

“Why do you refuse to call me Len?”

Tolly looks up at him grabbing his own cup of coffee and takes his sweet time answering, “Other people call you Len.”

“Other people call you Tolly,” Len reasons, “what’s your point?”

“No one calls me by my name the way you do,” he murmurs into his coffee, “does it… should I not call you Leonard?”

“You can call me whatever you want, kid. Except… Leo. Don’t call me that.”

“I won’t,” he accepts easily, “anyway, as I was saying we can’t impose on you any more than we already are.”

“I’m offering and you need the favor,” Len says, pushing just a little further, “take it.”

Tolly takes just another moment of silence before he nods.

“Thank you, Leonard.”

When Edi wakes up, she clambers up to her usual seat on Len’s kitchen counter and digs into her pancakes with relish.

“Baby girl, the school is closed today so you’ll be staying with Mr. Snart.”

“Mr. Len,” Edi corrects before turning her bright eyes towards him, “are you my teacher today?”

“No baby girl, he’ll just be looking after you. Today is like an extra Sunday,” he explains.

“Oh,” she says before stuffing her face full of pancake, “so we’re goin’ to church?”

“Don’t speak with your mouth full, Edith Anne.”

“Sowwy,” the girl mutters through her mouthful of food.

Tolly heads towards the half bath beside the kitchen to comb his hair the way he does every day.

“No church today, kiddo,” Len says as he leans closer, “but we might still learn a thing or two. What’s your favorite thing to learn in school?”

“Colorin!””

“We can do a little art history then,” Len says with a tiny smirk, “visit a museum.”

“That’s where all the famous art is!” Edith points out.

“That’s right,” he agrees, taking a fork and stealing a chunk of her pancake. He’s seen the girl eat breakfast for long enough to know she’s about to give up on the plate but still enthusiastic enough to be annoyed with him.

Tolly peaks his half-combed head out of the bathroom, “Aren’t museums closed on this day?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be heading to work?” Len answers with a wink at Edi. She giggles and takes a sip of her orange juice before attempting to wink back at him. She fails in the most adorable way.

Tolly takes care of Edi’s hair the way he does every morning before work, with care and practice and lots of encouragement from her. When he finishes, he kisses the top of her head gently and helps her off her mirror stool. Len can’t help thinking about them keeping this routine even in the most difficult circumstances, often without mirrors or little stools to help. Just their quiet adoration of each other and a lot of determination, perhaps a bit of help from Miss Baez to get the hang of it.

Once Tolly is off to work Len is forced to face the enormity of what he’s done. Sure, he’s made sure that a little girl survived before, but that was years ago when he was only a child himself and Lisa wasn’t Edi. He can hear the scrape of her little sink stool in right before she returns from brushing her teeth and washing her hands and then she is inevitably there, looking up at him with enthusiastic expectation.

“Will we see pretty drawings, Mr. Len?”

He recovers as quickly as he can and falls to a knee beside her, “If that’s what you’d like to do, Miss Edith. I’ll take you to see the prettiest drawings in town.”

“Yes please, Mr. Len!”

He could certainly get them into any museum in town even if it were completely shuttered, but Memorial Day is a popular day for city properties and the Central City Museum of Fine Arts is packed. Len can’t case the place enough times, but Edi is fascinated, more often by the hundreds of people than the paintings. One hall, being particularly full, finally overwhelms Edi and the little girl whimpers quietly as she digs her little fingers into Len’s pant leg.

“Do you want to go home, Edi?”

She looks up at him, eyes frightened even as she shakes her head.

“I can’t see the paintings, Mr. Len,” she says, clearly upset.  

He looks around the room at the groups of hipsters and the obvious tourists, none of which he’s even bothered to pick-pocket, and nods before kneeling beside her.

“If you want, you can sit on my shoulders. Are you afraid of heights?”

Edi takes a moment to think about it before shaking her head no and reaching her arms out to him. The motion, so simple and earnest and completely trusting, it makes the air go out of Len’s lungs. He doesn’t hesitate and picks her up, placing her carefully on his shoulders and telling her to tug at his ears if she wants to get down. That makes her giggle even as her little fingers claw at his shoulders when he finally stands.

“How’s the view up there, Ms. Edith?”

“I can see everything!” she calls down, with her voice full of awe.

He parades her around the crowded hall, stopping every so often to check on her and making sure to hold on to her legs in case she swings unexpectedly. He carries her around the whole rest of the museum without feeling a single tug at his ears.

“The drawings were so very pretty, Mr. Len!”

“I did say they would be,” he tells her as he sets her down on the sidewalk outside the building, “now, how about we do lunch?”

Edi doesn’t answer, but only slips her little hand in his and squeezes, as if waiting for him to guide her to the right place.

Len thinks about it for a minute before he decides to take her to Lisa’s favorite place. It’s a short drive from the museum to the diner across the street from the police station and Edi looks around in fascination as they take a seat on Len’s old booth. He orders a burger for himself and some chicken tenders for Edi, with extra fries and a milkshake for each.

“What’s your favorite flavor?”

Edi, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hand, hums to herself in thought.

“M’not sure, Mr. Len, I don’t know what’s milshooks.”

“Milkshakes,” he corrects gently, grateful for how young Edi is, making her statement less bizarre to Lucy the waitress, “you’ll like ‘em. We’ll have a strawberry and a chocolate to start. See that place over there Miss Edith?”

“Mhm!”

“That’s where your PawPaw works,” he says, letting the lunacy of referring to Joe West as PawPaw pass right over him.

“Oh!” she says, clapping her hands in sheer joy, “can we go and see ‘im?”

Len glances sideways at Lucy, who knows Len and knows that’s not going to happen as she cheerfully sets down their plates.

“You know, sweetie,” Lucy says, “they’re real busy in there, but I bet you can visit him when he’s done with work huh?”

“I’m sure her daddy’ll love to take her to visit PawPaw after work,” Len agrees, trying not to be too violent as he opens up the straws for their milkshakes. He jabs one into the strawberry milkshake and slides it over for Edi to try.

“You’re not doing what I think you’re doing with a cop’s kid’s kid are you?” She asks in an undertone with murder in her eyes, “Cause I’ll march across the street, Snart. That’s a hard line.”

“Her father knows exactly where and who she’s with, Lucy,” he mutters as he sinks a straw into the chocolate milkshake, “mind your tables.”

She gives him one more hard look and Snart looks right back at her until she nods, curt but accepting, and turns back to her work.

Edi’s eyes go wide as she slurps up her milkshake and can’t be convinced to try the chocolate one and give up the strawberry drink at all.

“Fine then, eat your food though.”

She picks at the chicken and chomps on it before asking, “If daddy works at the music place and PawPaw works in there, where do you work, Mr. Len?”

Len absolutely does not choke on his burger and swallows his bite with grace.

“I don’t work at a place, Miss Edith,” he answers, “I work where and when I’m needed.”

“Oh,” she says, tilting her head and giving it some thought, “okay.”

Len smiles at her easy acceptance and switches out their milkshakes before she can protest.

“Just try it,” he says quickly, “and if you want the pink one back you can have it.”

She frowns and takes a sip with a scowl and under protest until the frosty chocolate reaches her tongue. Her eyes go wider than before and she quickly puts put her little hands around the glass and hollows her cheeks in her urge to drink more.

“Woah woah, slow down – you’re going to get a brain freeze.”

She lets go of her straw and seems just about to protest before she raises her hand to her forehead.

“Owie owie owie!”

“Told you, kid,” he says as he slips out of his side of the booth and comes over to hers, “here let go, come on.”

He pries the drink away and the one hand off her forehead before he rubs his hands together and presses one gently over her forehead, “Just close your eyes it’ll pass quick.”

After a few moments he lets go and Edi looks less upset but still fairly upset, before she scoots towards him and climbs on his lap, “It taste good but it hurt, Mr. Len.”

“Just gotta drink cold things slowly, kid. It doesn’t always hurt.”

“Okay. Can we go home please, Mr. Len?”

“Yes,” he says, firmly ignoring the annoying warmth that comes at the easy way she calls the place home, “yes we’ll go home now.”

It’s nearly three in the afternoon by the time they get home and Edi has been nodding in and out of consciousness the entire ride back.

“I think a nap’s in order, Miss Edith.”

“But I don’t wanna nap,” she mumbles, her eyes clearly heavy, “I wanna stay with you, Mr. Len.”

“What if I stay with you until you fall asleep,” he offers.

“Will you tell me a story?”

Len frowns. “I don’t know if I remember any stories,” he starts.

“You can make one up. Daddy makes up stories all the time. ‘bout horses and ‘bout dragons and queens!”

She’s suddenly much more alert and Len knows that good mood is going to take a hard dip if he doesn’t convince her to take a nap.

“Alright, I’ll make one up,” he agrees, “but first let’s get your shoes off and your puffs loose.”

They walk over to the room she shares with her father and Len helps her out of her shoes and gently removes the ties from her puffs, massaging her scalp gently before tucking her in.

She looks up at him with wide awake eyes, “Story?”

“Alright alright,” he sighs, “what kind of story?”

“A story about a princess!”

“Well...,” he says trying to make time, “what about…what about a story about a prince. Does that work?”

Edit thinks about it for a moment before she settles into her pillows and nods. Len takes a breath and then another, and then he tells the only story that he’s been carrying around these days.

“There once was a prince who ruled over a kingdom at the center of all things. He was good and kind and he was very brave. He kept his kingdom protected from harm. He was loved and beloved by everyone, even by a dastardly thief. And this thief he wanted to be worthy of his prince, so he went off on a quest with a group of rascals that also wanted to be better and special. The thief was thinking perhaps if he were a knight...but see the thief wasn't a very good knight, try as he might, and he became lost.

“He was saved by a... an angel. And with the help of this angel found himself in a dark and stormy kingdom ruled by a sad and lonely prince. This dark prince took a liking to the thief and gave him many gifts.  He gave him priceless books and lovely instruments to play music and he gave him a broken crown that belonged to a lost King.

“But the thief missed his home and his real prince, he missed the group of rascals he had set off on his quest with - and besides the broken crown of the old King didn't fit him. So, the angel brought the group of rascals to rescue him and bring him home. They had all become knights while the thief had been lost, and they brought with him the shining prince the thief had so missed.”

“And did the shining prince marry the lost thief?”

No, he... the prince had married a brilliant and beautiful princess. Do you know? You remind me of her. Together they looked after the kingdom better than ever before. But the thief realized that being a thief at home was better than wearing a crown that didn't fit in a kingdom that wasn't his.”

“And what happened to the dark prince?”

“I like to think he found the lost King and gave him the crown and that it isn't broken anymore and neither is the prince. I like to think they're happy now and their kingdom is as bright and safe as the one at the center of all things.”

“And what about the thief, is he happy too?” she yawns big and wide and her eyelids close more and more. Len’s tongue feels heavy and he can’t answer right away. He doesn’t know, is the answer. But that’s no way to end a bed time story. It’s the truth and that’s never satisfactory in fairytales. Len doesn’t know if the thief is happy, isn’t sure if he’s capable of it. But he looks down at Edi, her little eyes closed and her little mouth fallen open in sleep, her little hand curled around his fingers and he thinks… he thinks he could be.

“He’s trying,” he whispers as softly as he can, “he wants to be.”

\-----

Len doesn’t mean to fall asleep too, out on the sofa while Edi is in bed, but he wakes with a start when Tolly comes home before dinner. He pretends he was merely sitting, reading maybe, but he knows Tolly can tell when he’s lying.

They had a good day, he says truthfully, and Edi wakes for supper, for play and movie time and maybe a longer night than Tolly would have preferred since nap time came later, but Len offers to stay up and watch her in apology. Tolly looks tired after a day of work but still he shakes his head.

“She can use a little indulgence with both of us. Thank you for today, Leonard. It was nice not to worry.”

Again, there’s a little touch, the stroke of a thumb and squeeze of Tolly’s fingers. Then it’s gone and Len can only watch and wait for the illusion to be over.

It doesn’t end, is the thing. Edi goes to sleep. Tolly comes to the sofa beside Len as if to watch the news or some other normal ritual, but Len has nothing ready but himself. So they talk.

“We’re not a burden, you swear?”

“Can’t imagine anything further from it. You should set a lunch date with West though. She wants to see her PawPaw. Maybe her auntie Iris and Barry too, but you can avoid those more easily.”

Tolly chuckles, looking exhausted but somehow carefree reclining back. “I like seeing Joe. We can do that. Thank you again.”

Len should have put more ground rules down, expected something else, because the next day Tolly has a shorter shift, and Len is off elsewhere planning for a heist when he gets the text.

_Can you pick up Edi today?_

_Sure. You get an extra shift?_

_No. Barry would like to see me at the Labs._

Len feels his stomach plummet. _Any particular reason?_

_He wouldn’t say. I’m sure I won’t be long._

Len isn’t as certain. They’ve avoided STAR Labs, avoided Barry and Team Flash for their semblance of normalcy, and he thinks maybe Mr. West-Allen is letting his conscience run away with him and can’t let certain things go.

 _Sure. I got her_ , Len says, but he makes outside plans as well. He has his ways into the STAR Labs comms and security systems, partially because of Piper and partially because of his own skills. It isn’t hard, even before Edi’s pick up time, to infiltrate those lines and listen in for Barry’s voice.

Then Barry’s vice doubled.

Tolly doesn’t have a car, but he’s learned the wonders of Lyft and doesn’t hesitate to get around where needed. He’s gotten to STAR Labs just fine on his own, and suddenly, while driving to the daycare to pick up Edi, Len finds himself listening in on two identical voices sparring words.

“Mr. West-Allen. What can I do for you?”

“Tolly, I’m glad you came. I’m not trying to cause trouble, I just feel there are some things you should know for everyone’s benefit.”

Damn him and his altruistic nature, however misguided. Len debates taking the turn to Edi’s preschool or just driving straight to STAR Labs to intercept this mess.

“Everyone’s benefit? Or yours?” Tolly says, reading Barry well because he knows himself.

“I just want what’s best for everyone. For you. For Edi. For Snart.”

“And what is best for Leonard, Barry? I’m confused at your interest. Aren’t you happily married?”

“It’s not like that. I just…I owe Snart.”

“And what do you owe him?”

Len hits the gas a little harder and misses Edi’s turn. 

“I owe him less heartache this time around, which is why you deserve the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“About Bart,” Barry says, and Len hits the gas a little harder.

_I've got no strings to hold me down…_


	9. Chapter 9

Len floors the gas for one more block before he remembers Edi and feels like an ass, but he can't stop his forward momentum as he overhears Barry telling his version of Len's time with Hail.

Switching from the STAR Labs intercom to his phone, he calls Lisa over the Bluetooth filling the car.

"Can you be at Edi's daycare in five minutes?"

"Hello to you too. Why? Something up?"

"Nothing I can't handle." Len hopes. At least Edi won't have to wait. "Tell her that Daddy and I will be home soon."

"Ain't that just the cutest phrase."

"Lisa."

"I'm going. You know I love being an auntie. Even got a car-seat for these occasions. But you are gonna fill me in on what’s going on later."

Len debates switching back to listen in at STAR Labs but doesn't think he can stomach it. There's another car pulling out of the main turn when he pulls in, another Lyft, he thinks, Tolly leaving already, but if he's right then he has a few words for the Scarlet Speedster before he gives chase.

He storms into the Cortex to find Barry with Cisco. He doesn't pause or explain, just blows past them for the Accelerator, knowing Barry will follow so they can have this conversation in private.

"Did you bug the Labs?" Barry exclaims at his heels, but he does not get to play victim today.

"Why?” Len whirls around. “Why couldn't you let it be in my time? On my terms?"

Barry flounders, stricken and guilty for what he knows Len means. "He deserved to know. All this mess with him, Snart. You're getting too close again."

“You're the one who pushed me to go with him!”

“That was before I knew he was a liar!”

Len doesn’t think they’ve ever yelled at each other quite like this before and it’s too draining when he knows Tolly is headed home in who knows what sort of state. Barry is exhausting, he always has been, always forcing Len to play catch-up, no matter which version of him he might be dealing with.

Taking a breath, he steps in close to Barry. “And if he was a perfect version of you, would that be enough? Would that finally be enough for you to stop feeling guilty for not wanting me?”

“I…” Barry stumbles back.

“I don't want a perfect you. I don't want...you.” Len did once. He really did. But it’s a different world now.

“You want him?” Barry says like the thought had never dawned on him and he suddenly realizes what a terrible thing he’s just done. “I'm sorry, Snart. I never know how to say or do the right thing with this. I’m just trying to, I don’t know, protect you. You know it's not that I never... Because I do, you know, I… I care—”

“Don't.” Len stops him. “Please don't.”

But Barry pushes on one step further. “I don't want to be one more regret for you.”

How can someone be so selfish in their selflessness?

“And I don't want to be one more burden for you,” Len says.

Quiet settles between them and Len thinks he should leave now, but before he can sidestep Barry, the kid has more to say.

“Iris is pregnant.”

That shouldn’t feel like such a blow, even now. “Mazel tov,” Len grits out.

“Snart...”

“What? Guilty it's yours and not Thawne's? Guilty it won't be another Edi? Can’t you see it doesn’t work that way? We can have as many doppelgangers as there are worlds, it doesn’t make them us. Just be her Uncle Barry. Have your own damn kid, live your life.”

Barry stops him from walking away with a gentle clutch at his wrist that is so Tolly, but it also isn’t. 

“I don't want to be the reason you keep standing still.”

That’s the essence of purgatory, Len thinks, and he has been trapped in it, in strings, so many strings, but he means his words when he turns to Barry and says, “Seems the one standing still today is you,” and tugs away to get back to his car.

\--

Tolly is packing when he gets home, while Lisa is trying to distract Edi and gives Len a long, hard look.

“I know,” he says, and Lisa nods, not pushing for explanation yet. Len has worse problems to solve.

He hears her coax Edi away from her toys as he heads for the guest room and the soft little voice calling, “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Mr. Len!” is the only thing that makes Tolly snap out of his drone-like task of packing and turn on his heel.

“Lisa’s taking her out for ice cream while you and I talk about this,” Len says, in response to the dangerous look in Tolly’s eyes.

“There isn’t anything to talk about, Leonard,” he says as he turns back to his bags, “save to thank you for your help and your hospitality.”

“Tolly, what are you doing?”

“We are leaving,” he says, but it’s cold and short like a bank transaction, “we’ll be perfectly comfortable with Hartley until I can find us a home of our own.”

‘We’ and ‘us’ and ‘ours’, of course, because Tolly is slipping away through Len’s fingers like water and taking Edi with him and the illusion is dissipating at last. The dream is collapsing.

Something old and small and thick-skinned in Len tells him to let this go; to let them go. _If you’re out, you’re out._ He’s lived his whole life knowing people were more likely than not to walk out on him and the last thing he is, is surprised. He expected this. But he thought himself intimately familiar with every way he could hurt and the newness of this pain catches him off guard.

“I was going to tell you, I just… I needed… I wanted more time,” he says, not really sure what point he’s trying to make.

“I know that I am a beggar in this world,” Tolly says after a torturous silence, “but I will not be a toy or a replacement. I will not take part in mind games and play pretend, and I won’t let my daughter be caught up in that either.”

“So that’s it then, you’ll just take Barry’s word for it?” Len snaps.

“Allen cares about you, Leonard. Perhaps that is his great fault, that he wants so desperately not to hurt you and yet cannot love you. But Bart—”

“You don’t know about Bart and neither can Barry. He was blinded by how much he hated a dark and dangerous version of himself. He hated that I took what Bart gave me because it wasn’t what Barry thought I needed. It wasn’t sweet or pure or right, it wasn’t love – and I still took it. And Barry can’t stomach that.”

“Maybe I can’t stomach it either,” Tolly says, his face a mask of disgust that less observant eyes might mistake for just that – disgust. But it isn’t, Len can’t say quite what it is that Tolly is desperately hiding away from him, but he knows that liar’s mask when it presents itself.

_Fool me once…_

“You didn’t care when you found out about Barry.”

“Him you never had, unrequited love is... but Bart, _him_ you mourn.”

“Yes.” Len mourned a lot of things. “But you aren’t him, and I’m not trying to make you him. Tolly…” He tries that gentle touch for his own for once, hesitant fingers coiling around a frantically moving wrist and holding it steady so that Tolly has no choice but to either wrench away or stop packing. He chooses to stop, and there’s a crack in that careful mask when he finally looks up at Len.

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. Have I pushed for anything?”

“No, but I…”

He’d wanted Len to. He’d wanted him to push, probably just as much as Len wanted to dig at whatever lay between them and pick beneath it. But they’d both been too afraid to break the illusion to do anything about it before now. It was easier to float in purgatory. Now it’s broken by something Len hadn’t anticipated. The truth has never been Len’s friend any more than it’s been Tolly’s.

Tolly pulls his hand away and turns from him again, doing anything he can not to show his face when his emotions are so close to the surface.

“I never thought of what I’d do in this world, any world, once I got Edi free. I never thought of what any of it meant for me except that I’d do right by her. But then there was you and I don’t… I don’t know any more. I look at you and I…”

“Tolly, I mean it, I don’t want anything from you. Nothing you don’t want to give,” Len clarifies. “I’m only asking you to stay.”

“Why? I’m not him, I’m not either of them. And I’ve only been in your life a few weeks. Why do you want us here?”

Len opens his mouth as if there should be obvious words to offer, but every possible thought drifts away from his tongue and he draws a blank. It seems wrong to voice any of the things that come to mind, because they are qualities that Tolly and Barry and Bart all have in common.

_Because you’re vibrant and dauntless and willing to sacrifice everything for those you love._

_Because you could have all the power or none at all, and still you try, you persist, you survive._

_Because you’re never as good or as bad as you think, you’re just you—brilliant and blinding and more beautiful that anyone has any right to be._

Any of that could have been said to any one of them. If Len doesn’t want Barry, if he never truly wanted to keep Bart, what makes Tolly different?

“Give me an answer, _Leo_ ,” Tolly bites with an edge Len remembers from when the flip switched that first moment they arrived on Tolly’s old world and the liar’s mask fell away to reveal the real man beneath. But the name, spoken with careful purpose, conjures memories of a broken god, and Len’s tongue grows more silent.

Bart would have gone for a stab like that too, wouldn’t he?

“Edi will still wish to see you. You know where we’ll be if you’re inclined. My sincerest apologies, Leonard,” he says with finality, “that I did not live up to your expectations.”

Len screams at himself to think of a refute, to think of some answer, any answer to give for why Tolly should stay, because all he can imagine once he walks out that door is the quiet and the emptiness left behind that he isn’t sure he can bear again.

“Aren’t you being a little hypocritical? Aren’t you the one who came here looking for somebody with my face?”

Tolly laughs to himself, a dry chuckle.

“It’s true I came looking for your image with a purpose, but I felt the moment I met you that I’d never known anyone like you. I think we both know that you can’t say the same.”

He wants to argue more, he wants to lie with something seductive and just right, something that would make Tolly stay. Chances are Tolly would smell his lie a mile away and then, even if it worked, he’d be the one acting like that broken god—like Bart who couldn’t let the past go – clinging viciously to the image of what he’d so desperately wished for.

“I think I would have liked a fresh start with you,” Tolly says, the sincerity of it a new stinging wound on Len’s gut, “I really do regret it could never have been that for us.”

The door should slam, Len thinks. He deserves a gong to end this chapter of his life, but instead it closes with a nearly imperceptible click.

Eventually, Lisa returns, with Edi safely delivered back to her father without turning back. Len doesn’t look up at her and she doesn’t try to say anything. Instead she sits beside him and lays her head on his shoulder for a long while. She squeezes his hand before she goes, but eventually she does go and he is alone. The silence in the apartment keeps him up all night.

And the night after that.

And the night after that one.

\--

Len doesn’t expect Iris West-Allen in a nameless coffee shop on the wrong side of town. To be fair, Len doesn’t expect Iris West-Allen anywhere outside her home and STAR Labs.

“Snart!” she calls out, unable as most people of her social temperament not to acknowledge an acquaintance in public.

“Mrs. West-Allen,” he greets back, trying to gather all his patience and good grace even though it is the morning after one more sleepless night and Iris is delaying his progress toward caffeine.

“I didn’t know you came here,” she says, in a way that means she’s not all that delighted to see him either.

“And I know for a fact that you don’t come here,” he counters. “Any reason in particular for your detour from work? Does it perhaps have to do with the congratulations in order?”

“Thank you,” she says with a smile and a closely followed sigh. “Barry’s told everyone. The Jitters baristas included. They’re young and impressionable and convinced my usual order will shake a fetus up like a maraca, so I need to expand my horizons for coffee. I am allowed one a day.”

She adds the last like she’s escaping judgment but Len only rolls his eyes. “I know better than to tell a grown woman what to do with her body, have a little faith.”

They keep their silence for a spell and Len thinks maybe, perhaps, he can get out of the rest of this interaction unscathed. But she is a journalist and a soon-to-be-mother and the commander of a superhero crew, so that was never going to happen.

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard,” he says, adding about three pounds of sugar to his coffee and refusing to look her in the eye.

“I heard that Tolly and Edi have moved into the Rathaway apartment. I’ve heard my husband’s moral dilemma on whether his meddling did more harm than good. But none of that tells me what that means for you,” she says as she grabs her own cup and adds a sensible amount of skim milk.

He takes a breath and decides right there and then that he is too exhausted to fight the likes of Iris West-Allen on this. Instead he pulls out a chair for her and takes a seat across from the woman who should have every reason to loathe and mistrust him but instead asks how he’s feeling about being dumped by her husband’s doppelganger before he had a chance to make a move on him.

“You gonna charge by the hour?”

She smiles and stays quiet and waits, not too long, for Len’s remaining resistance to disintegrate.

“He left because he was right. He asked… he only asked if I saw him, if I could name one single thing that was only his, only ours, and I couldn’t.”

“Was he right, though?”

“Of course he was,” Len says, taking a short sip of coffee. “We can’t ever have a fresh start. I idolized your husband into martyrdom, I fell into a Stockholm syndrome with his dark twin. What can I offer Tolly that isn’t colored by the past?”

“Snart, everyone has a past – a fresh start is a choice that people need to make together. Every day. Besides, he isn’t right.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Something Barry has adopted as a mantra recently,” she says, reaching across the table like a wide-eyed child into a lion’s cage and laying her hand on his. “We can have as many doppelgangers as there are worlds, it doesn’t make them us.”

Len can’t accuse Barry of never learning. He can accuse plenty of other things and says as much to Iris. “You are a manipulative viper, Mrs. West-Allen.”

“Thank you. And you are very wise, Leonard Snart. The multiverse… it isn’t an existence of what ifs or connected strings vibrating at different frequencies, it is just… different people with familiar faces living lives as unique as snowflakes.”

“A beautiful sentiment,” he agrees, “but it changes nothing.”

“Tell me about Tolly,” she whispers after a moment.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snorts.

“Tell me about him, Snart.”

“He’s a liar,” Len starts, just to throw her off her romantic streak, “he’s a say-anything-to-live wretch who will never tell you the truth if he has a prettier lie to give, and he always does. He lost faith years ago but still makes the kid say her prayers, because he doesn’t want to give her his scars. He’ll make a cloud castle out of the ruble and ashes around her and smile at her even if he’s about to die. He doesn’t know what to do with all the life in front of him but he wanted me and he never lied about that. He sings like the angels he doesn’t believe in anymore and he deserves a true fresh start.” He thinks back a few months to a time drenched in blood, and smiles ruefully to himself. “A bright world and an undivided passion of his own.”

“Len,” she says, and as she does, he becomes aware of the pressure of her hand squeezing his own so tight, “go tell him that. Go tell him that right now.”

“The time for declarations has past,” he says as he pulls his hand away. “I have no claim on him, missed my chance.”

She stands, coming close as a challenge with her coffee in hand and her purse hitched up high. “And since when,” she says very pointedly, “have you had a problem taking what doesn’t belong to you, Leonard Snart?”

\--

Len doesn’t leave straight away, even after Iris has gone. He sits until his coffee grows cold.

He gets a fresh one before he leaves and finishes it before he reaches Hartley's door.

“Oh! Mr. Snart.”

“Mr. Len!” Edi blows past Hartley's legs to hug Len with abandon.

“Hey, little miss. Your daddy home?”

“He’s at work.”

“Tol has the early shift today, Mr. Snart,” Hartley says. He looks entirely human and healthy now, and he smiles like he knows a secret, but unlike Tolly, or Piper for that matter, he’s no liar. “The record shop is very slow this time of day if you need to see him.”

Romantics all around, Len thinks, but maybe that’s not so bad, even if he does feel destined for disaster.

“Can I come too?” Edi clings to his legs still.

“Next time, Miss Edith,” Len promises. “I have some things to say to your daddy on my own.”


	10. Chapter 10

Len has a plan when he walks into the record shop. He thinks he has a plan. Maybe all he has is an idea and a want and a small bit of hope he thought he’d lost.

He almost turns around as he steps inside and the drumbeat of a familiar but grating 90s song stops him with the first belt of lyrics.

 _I would do anything and that's_  
What scares me so bad  
Don't want to live my life alone  
Don't want to go back  
To what I had  
Don't want to spend  
My life without  
All those special things  
Don't want to walk around  
Being tied to  
Anyone else's

_Strings…_

Tolly is shelving records and doesn’t see him. The shop is indeed slow, nearly empty as Hartley had said, but the young woman working the counter has to be polite and attentive and calls out to Len.

“Can I help you find anything?”

“No,” Len has to answer, “I’m fine, thanks,” but despite how quietly he speaks, Tolly’s body language shifts as he glances over, face already steeled with resolve.

Len continues forward nonetheless.

“I’m working, Leonard.” Tolly goes right back to shelving. “If you need something, you can call on me in the afternoon when I am home. Or feel free to visit Edi without me. I am sure she would like to see you.”

“You were right. I did love Bart,” Len says without preamble, quiet enough between them that the roar of the music drowns the conversation from drifting to Tolly’s coworker. “I loved Barry too. And all it brought me was suffering. And after, all I wanted was to be left alone, to _mourn_ alone. Then you showed up.”

“Leonard…”

“I don’t love you.”

Tolly flinches and looks up to meet Len’s eyes finally, too stunned and sobered to hide behind any masks.

“I haven’t known enough of you to love you,” Len says, “that’s on me. I couldn’t look at you and not look for them. You were right. I haven’t been fair to you.”

Tolly nods, shifting the records in his hands as he does so.

Len reaches out to lift Tolly’s chin up, since he’s gone back to avoiding his gaze, “But what I like about you, the reason I want you to stay, it has nothing to do with either of them. Except your face, which turns out looks even better with a beard.”

Tolly laughs like he’s caught himself off guard, and it catches Len off guard too with a wonderful nudge.

“Barry might twist the truth on occasion, but he’ll always do what’s right in the end. Bart could never see past himself, forgot about his responsibilities and about the people who still loved him. You’re different, Tolly, a different kind of survivor. My kind. You’re a con and a liar and you’ll do anything in the world, right or wrong, for your family. You’re not lost or broken, you’re not all powerful and unstoppable, you’re just worn, tired and hungry for calm. You want to build something beautiful even though you’ve never had it and maybe don’t think you deserve it. Neither have I, and I never thought I wanted it. But building it with you and Edi could make it _ours._ A fresh start, up from the dirt, that’s something neither of them could give me.”

“Because of Edi?” Tolly asks in suspicion, still thinking Len isn’t admitting he wants _him_.

“Because of the way you look at me,” Len counters immediately, “with suspicion and trust at the same time, sparing me an ounce of the little bit of faith you have left. Wanting me. Seeing me. I want to show you that I see you too. When I look at you, I’m not seeing ghosts. I’m seeing what can be. If you could ever want that and be willing to come home.”

Tolly turns away from him slowly, returning to his task and shelving the records with that tension still sitting on his shoulders. Len watches him, thinks he can hear the thoughts being weighed and balanced in the other man’s mind until his hands are empty.

“We will remain at Hartley’s,” he finally says as he turns towards Len, “but …you may court me. I will not wait around for you to figure out whether or not I measure up but… you can try to show me that _you_ do.”

The proposal throws Len off balance. He’d been ready to have Tolly and Edi back in his space, to try to build a life together. Dating, on the other hand, seems unfathomable. He has loved people and he has fucked people but he has never _courted_ someone—at least not in any normal way that he can count as successful.

Tolly is waiting, his face a mask of implacable calm.

“Tomorrow night,” Len finally says, “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

\--

Len’s the one who knows Central City best, even if Tolly was the one to ask for a date, so it’s up to Len to pick a spot. Not Saints obviously, some place nicer but still out of the way of accusing eyes that might know his face, pardoned by the CCPD or not. A few restaurants spring to mind and he texts Tolly the morning of.

_Italian or Chinese?_

_Not sure I’ve had much of either. You choose._

Len goes with Chinese, a little place closed up for money laundering once, but it’s open again from the same owners, who’ve either gotten smarter or simply enjoy what they do to avoid the illegal side business. He figures dinner, then a path to tread along the river to see the city at night and just exist together outside confined walls should be good enough for a first date.

He is woefully unprepared for how bad he is at the concept beyond planning it.

Len dresses well but not overdone, knowing what all Tolly’s clothes look like since he once had them in his own closet. Tolly opens the door to Hartley’s apartment in a flawlessly pressed grey button down and dark jeans, and with his trimmed but still mostly full-coverage beard, he looks beautiful in all his own way.

“Leonard.”

“Tolly.”

“Mr. Len!” Edi hugs his legs like last time, and he goes in and chats with her a few minutes to appease the stability she lost before they say their thanks to Hartley for watching her and leave. It’s a fine enough start. They’ve done domestic and dinner and conversation before, but Len’s silver tongue never did him any favors where real emotion was involved.

Once the food is ordered, a mortifying silence falls between them. Almost instantly Len begins to question himself. Maybe Tolly is right about more than Len gave him credit for, maybe he’s only set Tolly up for disappointment.

“How is Edith liking the high-rise?” Len asks, just to keep the conversation safe.

“She wasn’t too impressed by the sights,” Tolly says, toying idly with the silverware. “She’s never been so high up before. And when Hart started to give her stories of the Waverider, she wanted to hear nothing but.”

“Yeah well, the Waverider is an impressive beast,” Len says with a quick smile.

“ _You_ never told her stories of it,” Tolly points out. “She might like that.”

Len doesn’t have the heart to tell him that his time on the Waverider was hardly joyous. That he tried to change his past and couldn’t, that he nearly ruined everything between him and Mick, and that he still wakes jolting at the memory of that endless explosion.

“Or not,” Tolly concludes after what Len realizes is way too much silence.

“How’s…work?”

Tolly gives him a clearly judgmental look but sighs. “Work is going well, great actually. There is more music than one could ever listen to, endlessly available, and it is wonderful to help someone seek some old sound they have half forgotten. Or something new that a friend or a lover has recommended. My favorites are the ones who come and listen for hours before their faces become illuminated. No one seems to mind that I am unfamiliar with most singers and types of music, they seem excited to teach me about their favorites.”

“So, you’re making new friends,” Len mumbles, “people you share experiences with.”

“Well none of them have jumped across dimensions into a different world before, so you do have that advantage,” Tolly notes, with a bit of bite.

“I didn’t mean,” Len sighs before he drops off, because he did mean in his own masochistic way to suggest that Tolly might find a more compatible lover in his day job.

“Why don’t we talk about something else,” Tolly says.

Len can see a lifeline when it’s thrown at him but he can also feel himself contracting in a way that he doesn’t usually. If you put him in a life or death situation, he can cajole and sweet talk his way out of anything. But this? Being asked to be genuine and vulnerable? Len isn’t sure he can. Every topic is a potential minefield and he can feel the silence stretching out before them. He can see Tolly’s mask creeping and hardening slowly, maybe looking for lies to escape with.

When he’s finally about to break and say something, anything, Tolly’s eyes go wide and then the mask falls hard and closed over his expression. Len turns towards the door where Tolly had been looking and rolls his eyes. Of course, because this wasn’t a disaster already, Barry and Iris are making their way in.

“Did you know?” Tolly’s voice across the table is no longer cautious or exasperated, it’s goddamn pissed.

“What?”

“Leonard, did you know Allen and his wife were going to be here tonight,” he asks with the dangerous calm Len has used right before shooting someone point blank in the head.

“No, what…why would I know where Barry would be tonight?”

That, Len realizes immediately, is the wrong thing to say. It’s the wrong thing to say because it isn’t strictly speaking true and Tolly is the only person he’s ever met who can outlie him. It’s the wrong thing to say because for several years he made it his business and outright career to know what Barry Allen did in his spare time and he absolutely knew he’d be out on the town with Iris tonight even if not where. And it’s the wrong thing to say for reasons Len can’t fathom, because it makes Tolly stand slowly while his chair scratches across the floor and he drops his napkin on the table, turning towards the restrooms without saying a word.

At least it isn’t the exit, but Tolly hides his face when he has emotions he can’t mask, so a full departure to gather his composure is hardly a turn in the right direction.

Len didn’t know Barry would bring Iris here tonight, but it makes sense someone else who likes to hide from the public might choose an out of the way place that might have illegal dealings to look out for and happen to make the best dumplings in town.

He has a choice, several in fact in that moment, but all he wants is to reach the bathroom before either West-Allen spots him. He ducks off, grabs Tolly’s forgotten jacket to abandon the booth entirely and makes it without anyone noticing. He doesn’t see Tolly right away, maybe because he makes a point of entering silently so Tolly doesn’t spook by hearing him coming.

Tolly is in a stall at the end without the door closed. Len can hear him, a faint and shaky intake of breath before a sniffle breaks free and he makes a disgusted noise at himself for crying. He takes a breath and then another to calm himself, but it doesn’t seem to work, so he tries a different tactic, one he’s used to escaping in. Len has heard him do it over several weeks whenever Tolly cooked or did dishes or laundry or almost anything at all.

He sings. Soft like his crying, but still Len hears a melody and words. He doesn’t know the song but the part that stings is:

_Happy to lie back, watch it burn and rust  
We tried to work, good God it wasn't for us_

“And they call me the melodramatic one,” Len says as he peers around the edge of the stall door.

“Leonard…” Tolly starts, sitting up sharply from where he sits on the edge of the toilet.

“I didn’t know they’d be here. No subconscious slip either, just a terrible coincidence to continue a terrible evening.” Len hands Tolly his jacket, but Tolly doesn’t stand, so Len doesn’t move out of the doorway. Nothing else about this night has been romantic; who’s to say a few minutes in a bathroom stall will ruin it? “You know, I never heard Barry sing and always hated it when Bart did, but from you it’s…calming.”

A smile twitches at Tolly’s lips. “I'm sorry I jumped to conclusions, Leonard.”

“Sorry I’m such a poor dinner date that this view is preferable,” he says, motioning around the stall.

Tolly laughs genuinely and all that tension built up finally sloughs away, allowing Len to smile too.

“Wanna sneak out the window before we get company?” Len gestures to his left. He could pry that open easy.

“We already ordered,” Tolly says, as if only half believing Len means it.

“Technically not a ‘dine and dash' if we don’t eat anything. The newlyweds didn’t see me. Let’s get out of here.” Len extends his hand and it’s not Romeo and Juliette on a balcony, but who wants that story anyway.

Len helps Tolly out the window first and enjoys the view without ogling. They hit the pavement lightly with feet that are used to being silent, and when they come around the building only to see Barry and Iris right there through the window, Tolly pushes him and they scamper away like stampeding, giggling teenagers risking the ruin of their sneaky escape.

It should be awful but they’re still laughing when Len tugs Tolly by the wrist toward the river walk. There’s a Big Belly Burger along the path.

Len has a burger and a shake, Tolly a burger and fries, which doesn’t make walking easy but they don’t feel like sitting. Len offers his shake for Tolly to steal sips, and Tolly shakes fries into Len's mouth since they don’t have free fingers. Manners matter less with just them. Len quietly loves the way chocolate gets caught in Tolly’s beard. He lets him finish the shake when they’ve thrown the rest of their wrappers away.

“I’d say this sort of first date is more our style, wouldn’t you?”

“Definitely,” Tolly says, “though I don’t have much to compare it to.”

“Well then, I can tell you that I am a wonderful date and I ordered the view just for you,” Len indicates the river and sparkling night sky and Keystone beyond with a grand sweeping gesture.

Tolly laughs at his exaggerated drama. “You are terrible at this.”

“The worst,” Len grins, and there’s a moment when neither is hiding anything in the depths of their eyes, “so why not go for broke? Not every day I find someone worth being a fool for. And I mean that,” he stresses, because it really isn’t every day despite Barry and Bart existing before Tolly, because they really aren’t the same. “You took to escaping out that window like a pro too.”

“Ah so is that what you’ve been waiting for? A scoundrel like you?”

“The right kind of scoundrel with the right shade of morally grey.”

“It’s true I am hardly law-abiding.”

“And if you enjoy a good getaway so much, I should take you on my next heist.” Len is joking of course, but Tolly pauses while slurping up the last of the chocolate shake.

“What would that entail exactly?” he finally says, catching Len off guard with his untainted interest. “You don’t really have any need, do you?”

“Usually, these days, I’m stealing something that was once stolen from someone else to give it back.”

“Perhaps I could assist in planning one then at the very least, see what strikes my fancy.”

They pass an explosion of rainbow near the park with posters on every surface and tree for upcoming Pride events. Tolly snags a flier about to blow loose in the wind.

“Piper asked if Hartley and I might want to attend. Too rowdy for Edi?”

“They have family events. You’ll make a cute couple in your respective flag T’s, if you give into the consumerism.”

“It's not like that,” Tolly says, knowing full well Len didn’t mean it as real jealousy. “I’d hoped you’d come too, when we first talked about it.”

Len hadn’t been to Pride in years. “I might be persuaded.”

“We’d have different flags?” Tolly asks with a frown and his often forgotten naivety.

“I can give you a crash course. People like having something to call their own, that's just theirs, fits them and what they want just right.”

Tolly’s eyes dart up from the flier. “Even if it takes a while to find it?”

“And takes them by surprise,” Len answers, following Tolly’s thoughts.

Tolly smirks back at the flier before letting the wind take it and then slips his hand in Len’s like a thief in the night without calling any attention to the act.

“Tell me about your favorite heist,” he says as they continue away from the park, further along the river. “Though I suppose that might star The Flash.”

“He's crashed our date enough I think. And besides, my favorite heist was a good decade before I met him.”

He tells a tale, and another, and another, all true, before he quietly begins to speak of a dangerous theft for the control of all time itself and how, as terrified as he was at the end, he was proud and ready to die, only to wake up on an unfamiliar shore.

With a sad and lonely Prince missing his King who was and wasn’t everything Len ever thought he wanted.

“Maybe souls from another world aren’t meant for one another,” Tolly says when Len has finished his version of what Barry spilled too soon.

“Try telling that to Leo and Ray.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Tolly says softly.

Their walk has taken them back to the high-rise by now, but it’s late and Len assumes—

“Come in?” Tolly asks. “Edi is surely asleep by now.”

Len can’t say no.

Hartley is asleep in his room, Edi in her corner of the bed she shares with her father, so Tolly closes both doors tight and makes them each a drink.

“Wouldn’t have thought the kid indulged.”

“Hart doesn't, but Piper has plenty to spare.”

It’s an Old Fashioned he makes for them, with top shelf liquor that burns just right.

“Do you know, I’m a bit of a thief myself,” Tolly starts in a comfortable, easy way as they lounge on the overstuffed sofa, which relaxes further with every sip.

“You work tomorrow?” Len asks given the time and the drink and the promise of more time.

“Not until the afternoon.”

“Then I want to hear every story you got… _thief_.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All praise Auntie Crimson for getting us over the hump and closer to the finish line with this story - thanks for your patience ya'll!

Len worries initially that all Tolly’s stories of thievery in another world will be too real—stealing food to eat and clothes to keep warm, stealing people away who need to be saved, stealing into shelter to keep safe from a storm. Tolly grew up running and scrounging and barely getting by, after all.

It warms Len that instead, he tells him tales of rare joy and adventure.

“Eddie was the most conspicuous person you ever laid eyes on,” Tolly says with a laugh, speaking so differently of grown Eddie than of his little Edi, though Len can picture what the man might have been like having briefly met his doppelganger, pretty boy that he was. “So ya see, he figures wearing a dress’ll make it easier, even knowing how bad it would look for him if he got caught, clean shaven or no, but he was determined to get Iris that pillow those last months of pregnancy.

“Naturally, a stiff little soldier, too young for his britches catches him straight out, but the boy’s so ruffled at finding a man under that getup, he can’t decide what to do. The distraction was all I needed to play hero, slip in, take advantage of every blind spot til I’d not only gotten the pillow but several blankets and rations for my trouble, and finally had to wave Eddie back to us after he was ten minutes into a tale of how he was cold and the dress was all he could find to throw on.”

Tolly’s laugh, completely at ease, is a rare sound that Len treasures, even hushed to keep from waking Hartley or Edi in the bedrooms. He’s all finished with his Old Fashioned, sipping between stories, though Len is only about halfway through his with how enraptured he’s been, just hearing Tolly spin a tale, something he can do whether lying or being truthful, but this is all truth, he can tell.

Piper’s furniture is overly large, the big L kind of sofa, so while Len claimed the corner before long, legs stretched out across the chaise portion, Tolly sits in the cushion right beside him, his own legs tucked under him, leaning in close to Len like they got no space at all.

Len takes a longer sip finally, watching Tolly’s dimples beneath his beard and the crinkles at his eyes. It’s the lines maybe that betray him as someone fully unique from his doubles, because he may be beautiful and young, but wear and tear presents itself differently in different people with different experiences. This weariness, fond and nostalgic, Len _gets_.

“Eddie wasn’t the type to want to wear a dress normally mind you, but it’s nice here, seeing all walks of people wearing whatever they please, some all painted in rouge or ink or both.” Tolly sighs with a buzzed sort of wistfulness, more carefree than he’s been in too many years, Len would wager, knowing there are no demons on the streets ready to steal him or his loved ones away.

“Ever tempted yourself?” Len asks, wondering idly if its longing he sees or just bliss.

“Maybe,” Tolly says with a smile, cryptic and teasing. “You sure did look fine in that kilt for Leo and Ray’s wedding. Edi would have loved to see you twirl more.”

“Just her?”

Tolly chuckles and drops his eyes, a rosy glow in his stubble-covered cheeks, so inviting Len can’t help but reach for one and brush his thumb beneath a bright hazel eye.

“I think we’d both knock a few souls dead with a little black just…here.” He runs his thumb slower, imagining how green Tolly’s eyes would look with a little liner.

Like Barry pretending to be Bart when they…

No, Len doesn’t want to think of them, only Tolly.

He must be buzzed too, even if he is behind a few gulps, not one to drink these days. His thoughts are drifting, his hand drifting…downward to gently hold the side of Tolly’s neck.

Tolly sits up quickly to kiss him, not harsh, just frantic, used to stolen moments and too little time on his side. He’s agile and without faltering as he somehow gets both glasses out of their hands and onto the coffee table so he can push into Len’s space without breaking stride.

It’s a press, just a needy press at first, then a lick around the ring of Len’s lips, and he’s shuddering and sighing and opening up despite himself because _this_ he knows and misses and has wanted in so many ways but finally with Tolly it’s…new. And real. No tricks just mutual desire. He never realized how much better this boy could taste when they’re on the same page.

Though maybe the page they’re headed toward should be further along in the story. They’re not drunk, but it’s still late and maybe too new for thieves in the night when they have time.

Tolly’s climbing on top of Len, already pawing at his shirt and kissing him deeply, so Len has to use a little force to dislodge him.

“Hey… Hang on.”

“Why? It’s okay, I want—”

“You said to court you.”

“ _Fuck_ courting,” Tolly moves his hands to press to the back of the sofa, straddling Len’s lap, lips all but brushing his, “I want you _now_.”

It’s always a challenge to say no to this face, this voice, but with Tolly things have to be different.

“Too bad,” Len says, holding firm. “I don’t go back on deals.”

Tolly huffs and sits back with an agonized expression. “Not unless it benefits you, I hear. And trust me, this would.”

Len can feel that with how Tolly is still sitting on him. “Tempting…” he pats the younger man’s hips, “but I’ll have to give you a raincheck,” and rolls him back onto the other side of the sofa.

Tolly goes without fuss but not without complaint. His groan and reddened lips are highly unfair to look at, especially when he runs a hand through his hair to muss it. “Why do I feel like you’re getting me back for something?”

“Just making sure you know what you want. Next time, I won’t have any doubts.”

He grasps Tolly’s face again, just once more, so he can be the initiator and kiss him soundly, full of promise but just enough restraint to make Tolly lick his lips in the aftermath.

It’ll be worth the wait.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer chapter for you this time, and sugarybowl and I wrote a song together in this one :-)
> 
> Enjoy!

“Thank you for picking me up from school, Mr. Len.”

Edi swings her feet as Len adjusts the straps of her seatbelt.

“You don’t need to thank me for picking you up from school, Miss Edith.”

“But you’re doing my daddy a favor and daddy says to always say thank you for favors.”

“I… well I guess you’re right. But I’m happy to do it.”

“I’m happy when you pick me up too, Mr. Len! I’m happy when Daddy picks me up, too – but when you pick me up sometimes we go for ice cream and you make funny faces at loud people in the ice cream shop and sometimes Miss Lisa comes and it’s so fun!”

“Is that your way of telling me you want to go get some ice cream, Miss Edith?”

“Yes please! Mr. Len why do you and Uncle Hart have short pinchy hair?”

Len leans back and blinks, startled by the rapid-fire change in conversation. But that’s five year olds for you.

“Well, it’s…easier.”

“Does it grow?”

“If I let it.”

“What color is it?”

“I guess it’s… probably a bit of a mixed bag now.”

“Does it grow straight like daddy’s or curly like mine?”

“Why the sudden interest in my hair, miss?”

“I need to know, Mr. Len. For my art.”

“For your art?”

“Yes. I don’t want you or Uncle Hart to look bald, because you aren’t bald, but I drew Uncle Hart with hair like he had before but I don’t know what your hair was like before.”

Without thinking, Len runs a hand over his head, short and pinchy just like she’d said. He can barely remember the last time he let it grow out at all. He must have been a little older than Edi then. He doesn’t remember what it looked like, but he remembers his mother. He remembers the laughter in her voice when she ran her hands through his curls.

“Maybe my sister can find a picture for you,” he lies, “now – ice cream?”

Len tries to keep track of Edi’s ever-changing topics as he drives, and he is just about to make the left turn toward their usual spot when his clean phone starts ringing through the car.

“It’s Daddy!” the little girl in the backseat calls out as her father’s picture pops up on the dashboard screen.

“Seems like it is,” Len says as he answers the call, “Tolly?”

“Leonard,” Tolly’s voice calls like an inquisitive bell from the car speakers, “precious cargo with you?”

“Sure is.”

“Mmm,” suddenly Len could hear it, the smooth velvet of Tolly Wells lying, “would you mind terribly turning about to Papa Joe’s? He’s just called, been missing Edi something awful.”

“Don’t mind at all,” Len says, eyeing the little girl through the rearview mirror to make sure she hasn’t caught on to anything strange at all, “big family get together?”

“Oh, you know, everyone is so busy with work and that – running errands at the bank – just Papa Joe and Mama Cecile holding the fort.”

“Ah, sure of course,” Len says, making a swift U-turn, “why don’t I drop by once Miss Edith is settled – lend a hand?”

Len tries as a rule, ever since certain events, not to think of what his life has come to. But sometimes, some moments, are too bizarre for him to simply not acknowledge. Standing at the doorstep of Joe West’s house and ringing the doorbell while a less than cheerful little girl pouts in his arms is certainly one of those.

West opens the door and seems to have the same moment of destabilizing acknowledgement before he reaches out for Edith.

“Tolly called?” Len asks.

“He did,” West says as he settles the little girl on his hip, “I’ve got her. They’re at 1st National. You’re familiar.”

Len startles himself with a chuckle, “I am.”

He leans in to kiss the top of Edi’s head and is met with Joe’s inquisitive stare.

“Bye bye, Mr. Len,” Edi mumbles, playing with the neck of her Papa Joe’s shirt.

“I owe you an ice cream, Miss Edith.”

 

-

 

By the time Len makes it to 1st National, Barry is running sparky circles around the most garishly dressed would-be robber, and Ramon is unnecessarily transporting hostages where they could easily be escorted down the street. Tolly is nowhere in sight, however, and Len is clearly not needed.

He looks around, tucking his gun into his coat and stepping back into an alley before he’s spotted by a smartphone.

“Look at you,” says a family teasing voice, “running toward danger like a real-life Superhero.”

Len turns around in search of Tolly, wondering how he possibly could have known that this was the alley he’d duck down. “Why do I get the feeling I have been maliciously played?”

“Not maliciously,” Tolly grins as he hops down from a fire escape like a teenage felon.

“You know your daughter was very disappointed not to get her secret ice cream escapade today.”

Tolly saunters closer—and it’s just that, a saunter. “I’ll give my daughter a world, two even, but she’ll live without a scoop of strawberry. I, on the other hand, am on the verge.”

“On the verge?” Len pulls back to study Tolly and be sure he’s reading him right.

“On the absolute verge of madness,” Tolly all but purrs, backing Len up so impressively, he’s not quite sure how the stairs to the fire escape appeared so quickly. “I’ve been positively climbing the walls.”

“Are you trying to say you’ve missed me?” Len twists his lips.

“I’m trying to say that Hart’s off on mission, Barry and company are occupied, Edi is with Joe, and no one is going to bother asking where we went.”

“And where exactly,” Len asks, turning in kind now to not so gently back Tolly towards the cold brick wall, “is it that we went?”

“Did you park legally?”

“Embarrassingly, I did.”

“Great. Then come with me, I’ve got a surprise.”

Tolly leads the way from the alley to another street, a quiet one nearly deserted by its proximity to the thwarted bank robbery.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tolly starts as he moves, taking Len’s hand without ceremony as he leads him forward, “but I didn’t stage that robbery just because it was conveniently close to this place. It was conveniently close all on its own, I only took the opportunity.”

Len stares at their hands, the places where they touch, the plains and dips of muscle where Tolly grips. “I can appreciate some opportunism.”

He barely even notices when Tolly comes to a stop except he stumbles like a new-born calf into the other man. It only makes Tolly laugh, quiet and rough, as he wraps an arm around Len’s waist.

“This jacket is much too warm, Leonard,” he notes as he runs a hand over the leather sleeve. “Have you considered cotton?”

“What are you avoiding?”

“I guess I’m feeling a little bit silly. I may have got over excited about this and deprived Edi of ice cream for no good reason at all.”

“She’ll live,” Len says, “and if West has anything to say about it, she’s already elbow deep in a gallon of strawberry ice cream. Now, spill.”

Tolly finally meets his eyes, the eyes that had been wandering, avoiding, and hiding something that he could not otherwise mask. He’s excited. He reaches into Len’s jacket and pulls out his pick-set, winking before he turns on his heels and gets to work on the door. Len cases the area without questions, the dud security camera and the shop keeper engaged with a customer across the way, who has too many flyers plastered on her display case to see well enough to Tolly’s B&E.

He catches the last few seconds of his handiwork, it’s clean and practiced but slow. Tolly’s work was practiced breaking into barns and storage basements full of goods, he needed to leave no trace, he didn’t necessarily need to be the fastest.

They slip into the darkened room, door clicking shut behind them. For a moment all he can sense is the sound of Tolly’s breathing and the solid warmth of his hand as it slips back into his, entwining their fingers. Then the lights come on and Len does what he always does, takes in every inch of their surroundings for danger.

The club is empty, dirty, and tiny. It has the kind of exposed brick which tell him the gentrification is probably weeks from taking it over, but for now it’s still just a seedy little nightclub with three bars too many and the kind of seat cushions that sticks to the thighs of patrons that aren’t wearing pants. Flush against the walls there are chaise lounges covered in purple faux-velvet. The stage is equally squalid, cramped up with lights that could probably double as hot plates.

“What do you think?”

“I think I hear rats.”

Tolly laughs and squeezes Len’s hand. “Yes well, it does remind me of some of the more hellish places I’ve inhabited – but it’s a start.”

“Start for what exactly?”

“Take a seat.”

Tolly disappears into what Len assumes is backstage and so he sits as requested, spinning a chair to straddle it and wait.

It isn’t that he’s surprised when Tolly emerges with a guitar and a stool, but then Tolly tilts his head and smiles, walking to the very edge of the stage before setting the stool down and taking a seat.

His long legs dangle close enough for Len to reach out and touch them if he wanted to and it’s just them in this quiet little shit hole of a club. It’s just Len who wanted infamy and fortune so much that he followed that drive to the ends of the multiverse and beyond death. It’s just Tolly who saw his world broken and unjust and decided to run for the vague hope of a better one, even though he was neither god nor champion, he was only a man who loved his daughter, like so many other mortals in so many other corners of so many other worlds.

When Tolly lays the guitar across his lap and looks Len in the eye, it’s just them in this empty street and in this busy city and every world that ever did or will someday spin.

The slow strumming begins, as practiced as Tolly's lock-picking, but he doesn't sing about his own world or the bittersweet homesickness Len knows the man carries with him. He doesn't sing about his sweet little girl or about the faith that evil men corrupted. He doesn't sing about any of the things Len would have imagined would be important enough to be expressed in the only way Tolly knows how to pray anymore.

He sings about something else.

_No crown of thunder upon my brow_  
_No power of God or gods leading me now_  
_But I've tried_  
_to offer this tired heart_  
_Falling down_  
_And beating on to lift up off the ground_

_This is my blessing_  
_This is my prayer_  
_Coz I have nothing_  
_But my world to share_

_You've played the hero and villain too_  
_I've played my games and won them all the way to you_  
_I've got_  
_no offer of kingdoms to give_  
_Running on_  
_To find a home instead if you'll come along_

_This is my blessing_  
_This is my prayer_  
_Coz I have nothing_  
_But my world to share_

The familiar mask is absent from Tolly’s face as he continues into a bridge and stands, hopping off the stage and taking the few strides toward Len.

_Worlds apart_  
_And so much lost_  
_I think of the cost_  
_to find you_  
_Like a light in the dark_  
_to run home to_

In a reflex Len doesn’t recognize, he places his hands on Tolly’s hips and looks up at him.

_This is my blessing_  
_This is my prayer_  
_Coz I have nothing_  
_But my world to share_

A final strum lingers, and Tolly smiles.

“I saw an ad for this place pinned up at work. They wanted people to sing for cheap and I could stand to sing for free so I thought…maybe we could make a night of it, all of us. But I wanted to show you first. I wanted something to be ours, first.”

Len stares at the rawness and the candidness of him and he wants to shrug off 40 years of hardness and be bright for this man.

“You sure do have a set of pipes on you.”

“Leonard,” Tolly chides as he sets the guitar aside without moving out of Len's grasp, too well learned in evasion to stand for it.

“No one has ever-”

“Written you a song? I am not a gambling man, but I was willing to wager not.”

Len’s hands on Tolly’s waist clench over the soft fabric of his shirt. A considerable part of him isn’t so sure that the man in front of him won’t evaporate.

“No one has ever wanted to give me anything,” Len continues, closing his eyes, unable to look at the openness there in front of him, “not a piece of bread to eat or a roof over my head or a rope to hang myself with. I am not given…anything, important or otherwise and you- want to give me things.”

“Yes.”

He leans his head against Tolly’s stomach, “Precious things.”

Calloused fingers at the back of his neck set his body at ease—like a puppet with cut strings.

“More precious than any diamond you’ve ever palmed into your pocket,” Tolly says gently.

“There is a whole new world of better men and women than me. Brave, powerful people, quick to love. I brought you to a world with heroes,” Len says as he stands, arguing a case for the angels one last time before he takes what he doesn’t deserve.

Tolly lays a hand on his cheek, another curling under his chin. Len feels small, not in the way he did in the presence of Barry - like he had to climb mountains to keep up - or the way he did with Bart - as if he could be crushed underfoot any moment. He feels small and observed and found…and seen.

“I know,” Tolly says after a moment. “I know that you went through hell and came home to find your life strange and unfamiliar. You were heartbroken and hurt - but you saw me, through the fog of this face, you saw me - and you said yes to me. You were afraid and you were brave, you’ve no God given power and you stood up to cruelty, and I know that you don’t love me - but you loved Edith the moment you laid eyes on her.  I know that the shadows are calling you, Leonard, but you don’t belong to them anymore. You belong in this world of heroes. You belong in legends and songs.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, very,” he says as he pulls Tolly forward and kisses him, soft at first and then deeper and deeper like he could breathe him in and cleanse himself of all the broken years behind him. Like he could eat him up and hold him for his own.

Tolly responds in kind, hard and hungry, his hands gripping and tugging Len closer as if to gather him up greedily and fully in his arms. Their kisses and touches are desperate and sloppy, graceless and needy, dotted with more whines and moans than either have ever allowed themselves, Len knows - echoing in the empty space.

He loses himself in the curve of Tolly’s neck, the feel of his pulse - steady and strong - under his lips. He shoves and stumbles them over to the seats flush against the wall and there they pause, staring each other down like this gaudy lounge chair is a precipice they might throw themselves into.

Tolly peels his shirt off like a challenge, his lips teasing while his eyes remain in that state of urgent hunger. Len glances over his body, casing it like a mark; the burns along his shoulders, the faded scar on his side, the sparse trail of hair teasing down toward his jean’s buttons and the softness of his belly-

Tolly’s chuckle interrupts his discoveries. “So I’ve been enjoying ice cream as much as Edi has,” he says, voice light, “maybe a bit more at that. And the beer is particularly-”

Len interrupts back by tugging his own jacket off, discarding it and his long sleeved shirt on the filthy floor. He stands under Tolly’s gaze, as vulnerable as he knows how to make himself. He watches as the other man surveys him as well, taking stock of the trails of thin scars and keloids and the odd mismatched tattoo here and there. Tolly reaches out, his rough fingertips sending a shiver up Len’s spine as they half-caress and half-tickle the skin of his waist before Tolly falls to his knees.

Len feels as if _he_ were on stage, exposed to the whole world - scarred and aged and barely half-hard, but then Tolly’s there, his warm breath and the surprisingly shy touch of his tongue before the heat of his mouth closes around Len’s cock.

All the desperation of the previous moment seems to have melted away as Tolly’s tongue makes a determined and unnervingly slow journey over him. Len’s fingers dig into Tolly’s hair and tug as he feels himself harden in Tolly’s mouth.

He let’s out a shameless whine when Tolly eventually pulls away, the roughness of his beard against Len’s thigh making him let out another ridiculous noise which in turn makes Tolly chuckle - his voice a little rougher than before, and hell if that doesn’t make Len even harder.

“Sure you should be doing this before a big performance?” Len manages to breathe out.

Tolly chuckles again, rising up and he’s so very close to him, speaking into his mouth as he unbuckles his own pants, “This is my big performance, Leonard.”

He shoves Len back onto the nearly forgotten chair and clambers onto him, leaning down to kiss him again and trail his hands over his chest, every inch as if he were reading him by touch. Len reaches back, dipping his hands into Tolly’s jeans and pulling him forward, reveling in the way Tolly’s whole body quivers as their cocks brush against each other.

Pulling him into another kiss, slower and stronger than the last, he swallows Tolly’s moans as he wraps his hand around the both of them. Unprepared as they are and with only sweat and pearls of precum to ease their way, Len moves slowly - he finds that he’s enthralled by the slowness of them. Without blinding bursts of speed and movement, everything between them has weight and meaning. Every touch has a reaction and every sound can be burned into Len’s mind.

“Leonard,” Tolly breathes into his skin as he draws nearer to the edge, “Leonard...”

Len twists his hand just so and Tolly’s words break into a long broken whine, his nails digging into Len’s shoulders in perfect half moon cuts. Len holds him with his free arm and pulls him close, enjoying the feeling of the other man trembling as he comes.

Tolly is still shaking when he leans up to look Len in the eye, making his heart stutter and his stomach jump at what he sees. The warmth in Tolly’s eyes, the determination in them - he’s seen it before, but never directed at him. Not really him.

“You said before…that you think I don’t—”

“Shh,” Tolly shushes him, smiling but shaking his head. “We’ll get around to that too, I reckon, someday, but here and now, this is plenty.”

His hand is around Len the next moment, warm and wet and Len was already so close when he realizes that the new wetness is Tolly’s own. The mere thought throws him over the edge, and he clings to Tolly as if he might be set adrift otherwise.


End file.
